- Protecting and restoring peatlands and mangroves across Southeast Asia could cut regional land-use emissions by half, equivalent to 16% of global land-use emissions, according to a new study.
- It found that rewetting 5.34 million hectares (13.4 million acres) of drained peatlands, along with restoring degraded peat swamp forests and mangroves, could significantly enhance carbon sequestration, with Indonesia having the highest mitigation potential.
- Southeast Asia lost 41% of its peat swamp forests and 7.4% of its mangroves from 2001 to 2022, largely due to plantations and aquaculture, contributing 691.8 million metric tons of CO2 annually, with peatland burning alone accounting for up to 20% of emissions.
- The study underscores conservation and restoration as cost-effective climate solutions capable of drastically reducing national emissions, and calls on governments to integrate these efforts into their climate strategies to meet and enhance their Paris Agreement commitments.
JAKARTA — Southeast Asia’s peatlands and mangroves store immense amounts of carbon, yet they’re rapidly disappearing. A new study finds that conserving and restoring these ecosystems could cut the region’s greenhouse gas emissions from land use in half — equivalent to 16% of the world’s total land-use emissions.
An international team of scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS), with contributions from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore and James Cook University in Australia, assessed the potential for emissions reductions through conserving and restoring peat swamp forests and mangroves across Southeast Asia.
Their study, published in Nature Communications, concluded that despite occupying only 5% of the region’s land area, these ecosystems hold immense potential for climate mitigation.
According to the study, restoring currently degraded peat swamp forests and mangroves in Southeast Asia could reduce 94 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) annually. Combined with conservation, as much as 770 MtCO2e could be mitigated each year, representing nearly half of the region’s land-use emissions.
The study estimated that there are 5.34 million hectares (13.4 million acres) of drained peatlands in Southeast Asia, an area larger than Costa Rica, and that rewetting them offers the largest emissions reduction potential.
Restoring degraded peat swamp forests, of which there are 2.64 million hectares (6.52 million acres) in the region, and mangroves (0.07 million hectares, or about 170,000 acres) could further enhance carbon sequestration, the study found.
“These ecosystems pack a climate mitigation punch far beyond their size, offering one of the most scalable and impactful natural solutions to combat the planet’s climate crisis,” said Sigit Sasmito, from James Cook University, who is the study’s first author and led the work when he was a research fellow at NUS.
Geographically, Indonesia has the greatest potential for climate change mitigation through conservation and restoration activities. It has the largest area of both ecosystems in the region, said study co-author Wahyu Catur Adinugroho, a researcher from BRIN, Indonesia’s state research agency.
The reason why these ecosystems hold tremendous climate mitigation potential is because they share water-saturated, oxygen-limited soils that slow the decomposition of organic matter, enabling them to act as natural carbon sinks when undisturbed.
Furthermore, they store more than 90% of their carbon in soils, rather than vegetation, making them among the most efficient natural carbon sinks globally.
However, this also means that most of the stored carbon is “irrecoverable” — once lost due to human activities, it’s not easily restored.
“[W]hen peatlands and mangroves are disturbed, usually due to land conversion, they will release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere,” Sigit said.
Emissions from peat and mangrove loss
Southeast Asia lost 41% of its peat swamp forests and 7.4% of its mangroves between 2001 and 2022. The major drivers of deforestation of peat swamp forests are pulpwood plantations and oil palm estates, which accounted for a combined loss of nearly 4 million hectares (9 million acres) of peat swamp forests, or 74% of the total across Southeast Asia. These losses were concentrated in Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce nearly all of the world’s palm oil.
The threat to mangroves comes primarily from conversion to aquaculture ponds; this accounted for 62% of the losses across the region.
The loss and degradation of these ecosystems release 691.8 MtCO2e each year. Peatland burning alone accounted for up to 20% of total emissions, worsened by climate events like El Niño. These fires not only result in massive carbon emissions, but also contribute to massive volumes of haze that billow into other countries, often leading to diplomatic spats.
In total, Southeast Asia contributes about a third of global carbon emissions due to land-use changes, with most originating from the loss of tropical peat swamp forests and mangroves.
Critical but underused climate strategy
Given the scale of emissions, urgent action is needed to reverse this trend. The study highlights conservation and restoration as cost-effective solutions that can also help countries achieve their emissions reduction targets, known as their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), under the Paris Agreement.
“This is particularly true for Indonesia, where the mitigation potential from wetland conservation and restoration alone can exceed the country’s emission reduction target for 2030 in the unconditional mitigation scenario,” said study co-author Nisa Novita, senior manager of forestry carbon and climate at Indonesian NGO Nusantara Nature Conservation Foundation (YKAN).
The findings suggest conservation and restoration could reduce national land-use emissions by up to 88% in Malaysia, 64% in Indonesia, and 60% in Brunei. Other countries include Myanmar at 39%, the Philippines at 26%, Cambodia at 18%, Vietnam at 13%, Thailand at 10%, Laos at 9%, Singapore at 2%, and Timor-Leste at 0.04%.
Therefore, it’s crucial for governments in Southeast Asia to integrate peatland and mangrove conservation into national climate strategies, the study authors say.
Doing so will allow these countries to be much more ambitious in their NDCs, which have to be updated and resubmitted to the United Nations every five years, said study co-author David Taylor, a head of NUS’s Department of Geography.
“[This] can certainly contribute to increasing the ambition of countries across the region through the setting of higher emissions reduction targets,” he said, “although this would involve substantial investment in effective conservation and restoration.”
Citation:
Sasmito, S. D., Taillardat, P., Adinugroho, W. C., Krisnawati, H., Novita, N., Fatoyinbo, L., … Lupascu, M. (2025). Half of land use carbon emissions in Southeast Asia can be mitigated through peat swamp forest and mangrove conservation and restoration. Nature Communications, 16(1). doi:10.1038/s41467-025-55892-0
Banner image: Peatland forest in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Image by Nanang Sujana/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
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