The peninsula is bounded by the sea to the North and East, the Kampar river to the south, and has smaller rivers and canals crisscrossing it. The landscape is surrounded by water – and beneath the forest is one of the largest tropical peat swamps in the world. In places, the peat is 15 meters deep – that's deep enough to stack three double decker buses in.
Purely as a complex ecosystem – a last bastion of untouched forest, ecologically fragile beyond belief, and one of the most threatened biomes on the planet, Kampar is hugely important. But because of the peat bogs below the forest it also has a wider significance.
Peat bogs are delicate systems which store massive amounts of carbon. Half of the world’s tropical peat swamps are located in Indonesia, and Kampar is the largest remaining intact area of tropical peat swamp rainforest. And so Kampar is a key focal point in the struggle to halt climate change.
Around the world, an area of forest the size of a football pitch is destroyed every two seconds. Deforestation adds to all of the industrial pollution we pump into the atmosphere – not only by releasing the carbon that’s stored in trees and ecosystems, but also by destroying the natural carbon cycling capacity of the planet. Deforestation helps overload the atmosphere with carbon dioxide while destroying the planet’s natural regulation processes at the same time.
That’s why one fifth of the greenhouse gas emissions we put into the atmosphere each year come from deforestation. And one fifth of those emissions come from Indonesia’s peatlands.
Kampar is a region under threat from forest destruction. To the west, deforestation is encroaching as logging companies extract wood to produce pulp and paper for European markets, and clear ground for palm oil plantations, again to meet western demand.
That’s why we have opened a Climate Defenders Camp on the peninsula, to highlight the role that protecting peat and tropical forests must play in securing a safe climate. In the run-up to Copenhagen, our activists, working alongside local people, will be exploring the Kampar peninsula, showing how the destruction of the forest and the draining of the peatlands is contributing to climate change, and stopping some of the worst damage, in classic Greenpeace style.
Working with the local communities to realise our goal of protecting the peatlands and forests of Indonesia, we have lots of exciting activities planned on the peninsula over the next month. We’re going to be stopping deforestation and peatland destruction in one of the most fragile places in the world, and our technical team have set up lines of communication into the forest via satellite receivers to bring what’s going on directly to you over the web.
If you want to get updates about the climate defenders camp as it unfolds, you can sign up here for email updates with news from the peninsula - which might mean an email every few days for the next six weeks or so.