The devastating wildfires in 2015 left a mark on South Sumatra that residents have not forgotten. Nearly half of the fires that year burned across degraded peatland. Since then, the province – home to the second-largest peatland area on the island of Sumatra – has pushed to protect its peat more effectively.
The motivation extends beyond collective memory. South Sumatra's 2.09 million hectares of peatland regulate water systems, store vast amounts of carbon, sustain biodiversity, and support the livelihoods of the communities that depend on them. When peatlands dry out and burn, crops fail, water becomes unsafe to drink, and carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. Protecting South Sumatra's peat landscape is both an urgent local priority and a tangible contribution to Indonesia's national climate mitigation goals.
For years, the regulations were in place. A 2016 national government regulation and a 2018 South Sumatra provincial regulation both mandated the protection and management of peat ecosystems. Yet the rules sat largely unimplemented. Management responsibilities were scattered across agencies with no shared planning framework. Scientific data went unused. Land clearing and drainage continued. Another major wildfire happened in 2019—though to a lesser degree than in 2015. Women, who depend most directly on peat-based agriculture and fisheries for their livelihoods, were rarely part of the conversations where decisions were made.
Meanwhile, as the most productive lands in South Sumatra have already reached their expansion limits, the pressure on peatland areas continues to intensify. Since growing the economy through extensification alone would only further degrade these ecosystems, a shift toward sustainable peatland management is necessary. It was clear that South Sumatra needs a workable plan—one grounded in evidence, coordinated across institutions, and built with the people it was meant to serve.
Land4Lives worked alongside the South Sumatra provincial government, Banyuasin district government, and a multi-agency working group to develop a comprehensive peatland protection and management plan, called Rencana Perlindungan dan Pengelolaan Ekosistem Gambut (RPPEG) at the province and district level, covering all 36 peat hydrological units across the province; and RPPEG Banyuasin district, covering 16 peat hydrological unit.
The process brought together government agencies, research institutions, civil society, and local communities through focus group discussions and public consultations. Data on peat condition, land use, hydrology, and ecosystem services fed into scenario analysis that projected outcomes under different management approaches. Women's participation was embedded as a measurable target, with the plan committing to 30% female involvement in the management of peat ecosystem services and commodities.
The result is a document that translates provincial regulations into time-bound, spatially explicit, institution-specific programs — with indicators, responsible agencies, and five-year implementation timelines across four strategic areas: utilisation, damage control, maintenance, and climate mitigation and adaptation. For the first time, South Sumatra has a plan that links peat governance to spatial planning, provincial development targets, and climate commitments in a single framework.
"This document will serve as a reference for the management, utilization, and protection of peatlands in South Sumatra," said South Sumatra Regional Secretary Edward Candra.
As for the farming and fishing communities whose incomes depend on healthy peatland, this plan represents the first systematic commitment by the provincial government to manage the landscape they live in.
A similar gap between policy and practice shaped the situation in South Sulawesi. The Bila Walanae watershed covers more than 700,000 hectares across eight districts and drains into Lake Tempe — once known as Indonesia's fish bowl, producing 50,000 tonnes of freshwater fish a year. More than half the population living within the watershed depends on agriculture for their income. Every wet season, floodwaters inundate rice fields, settlements, and roads in Bone and Wajo districts. Every dry season, the same communities face water shortages. An older watershed management plan (Rencana Pengelolaan Daerah Aliran Sungai/RPDAS), drawn up in 2010, had done little to change this: roughly a fifth of the watershed remained in critical or severely critical condition, and most of the agencies responsible for it did not even know the plan existed.
Land4Lives supported the revision of the RPDAS Bila Walanae, producing an updated plan running through 2040. The approach drew on three distinct knowledge sources: the ecological knowledge of local communities, including women and people with disabilities; the perspectives of policy actors; and scientific hydrological modelling. Scenarios were run to project the watershed's buffering capacity under different land management options, and the analysis identified priority intervention zones across each district — reforestation, soil and water conservation, and water retention. Under the most ambitious scenario, the modelling projects a buffering capacity increase of up to 32%. Without intervention, decline continues.
Across South Sumatra's peatland and South Sulawesi's degraded watershed, the obstacles were not legal — they were structural. Governance was fragmented. Data was available but not used. Communities, particularly women, were excluded from planning processes that directly affected their lives. Land4Lives addressed each of these gaps through the same combination: rigorous evidence, strengthened institutional capacity, and inclusive multi-stakeholder processes. The resulting plans are now embedded in provincial development frameworks, with clear implementation pathways and monitoring mechanisms.
What happened in South Sumatra and South Sulawesi does not have to stay there. Both provinces represent two of Indonesia's most ecologically and economically significant landscapes, and the approach Land4Lives piloted there offers a tested foundation that other landscape programmes across the country can build on.