The health impact and economic cost of Indonesian fires and potential benefits of peatland restoration
Abstract
Fires in Indonesia cause large scale haze events, affecting air quality and health across Equatorial Asia. Land conversion and drainage has dried peatlands, making them susceptible to burning and large fires now occur regularly, particularly during periods of drought. The impacts of these fires are extensive, burning substantial areas of forest and cropland and emitting large quantities of CO2 and particulate matter, the latter causing adverse health effects. These fire impacts also have economic costs associated with them, which have been estimated for six higher than average fire years between 2004 and 2015, using the new FINNpeatSM fire emissions inventory.
In recent years Indonesia has made plans to restore 2.49Mha of peatland, with the aim of reducing fire emissions. Restoring and rewetting peatland can prevent fires, and reduce the size of fires which do occur. We have evaluated the effect this restoration could have on fire emissions, health impacts, and economic cost. We have used both `no fire' and `reduced fire' scenarios on the restored land, and see reductions in all fire impacts for both scenarios for all the years studied. We find that peatland restoration, if applied to areas with a high fire risk, could be an effective method of reducing the impacts of fires.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMU002...05K
- Keywords:
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- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATION