Indonesia’s peat forests are critical to stopping climate change. As much as 50 billion tonnes of carbon is locked up in Indonesia's peat bogs - the equivalent of eight years of fossil-fuel emissions.

But these peat forests are being rapidly logged, cleared and burned, producing huge emissions.

In order to create pulpwood plantations, oil palm plantations and other developments on peat-lands, the water must first be drained. This causes the dried peat to decompose, burn or subside to a level that plantation management can become often impossible after a few rotations, and the land then becomes waterlogged. Drained peat releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.This contributes significantly to the position of Indonesia as the world's third largest global greenhouse gasemitter, behind the U.S. and China.

In 2013 APP finally committed to protect forested peatlands, and in 2015 it announced the development of new peatland management standards, high-tech LIDAR mapping of peatland, and rewetting and restoration projects on 7,000 hectares of plantations.

However these moves came late and still haven’t been still implemented. Meanwhile, in Autumn 2015, huge fires have been ravaging Sumatra and Borneo. Investigations led to plantation management of APP affiliated concessions, where unaddressed heritage of decades of poor peatland practices, combined with third party deforestation and with a long dry season, has made APP plantations one of the sources of the fires.

The fires have created a smoke and haze crisis that is affecting the entire South East Asian region. It has impacted the health of millions of people in Indonesia and neighboring countries and has led to several deaths. The crisis has also caused schools to close around the region, shut down air transport, and released each day more greenhouse gasses than the average daily emissions from all of the USA.