 We had a very good first session. I'm really delighted. We started off with very wise words from Ravi and a welcoming speech from Harris Kunawan. So now on to our technical part of this session, which we have two sessions. Session one is basically focusing on the biophysical attributes, which are soil, climate, water, and greenhouse gas emissions. And without going in much detail, because we'll have a discussion session where we can touch upon these topics. I would like to introduce our first speaker, which is Professor Mark Reed. He is Professor of socio-technical innovation at Newcastle University. He's joining us from UK. His research is focused on enhancing the sustainability and resilience of peatlands and agri-food ecosystems. So here he will be talking about identifying core biophysical criteria and indicators for peatland monitoring and research. So without further ado, the floor is yours, Professor Mark Reed. Thank you very much indeed. It's a pleasure to be with you all. So as you are all aware, research is showing the protecting, restoring, and sustainably managing our peatlands can play an important role in combating climate change. But the task of creating national peatland policy is far from simple. Benefits for the climate may come at the expense of benefits already enjoyed by local communities and interventions that work in one location may have disastrous consequences when applied in a one-size-fits-all approach. Now, I think it's easy to criticise policy makers when things go wrong, but I think researchers need to take some of the blame. The reason I say this is that researchers have a nasty habit of making policy recommendations from single studies. I know that I've been guilty of this myself when my research funder has told me to make a policy brief at the end of my project. I've always tried my best to come up with something useful that could be done in policy or practice on the basis of my research. But what happens when another researcher comes along with contradictory findings and makes opposing recommendations to the very people I just briefed? Well, maybe one of us got the wrong answer, or perhaps we actually measured different things in different ways, or perhaps differences between our study sites might account for the apparent contradiction. Clearly, this is no way to make good policy, and the civil servants among us know, of course, that their task is to synthesise evidence from a patchwork of multiple studies and sites rather than relying on single studies, no matter how persuasive the evidence of that one study might be. But there is a problem. The majority of systematic reviews are unable to find enough high-quality evidence that can be synthesised because everyone is measuring different things. If two groups measure the same thing, say water table depth, they may measure it in very different ways using very different methods, which means we still can't synthesise their data. Even if they measure the same thing in the same way, the two groups might present their data in ways that prevent synthesis. For example, omitting crucial contextual details like the location or the altitude at which the data was collected. So I don't know if I'm comparing like with like. As a result, it can often be difficult to directly compare people into policy options because researchers have evaluated each policy option in different ways. For example, whether a policy option enhances biodiversity or mitigates climate change. It's also difficult to combine insights from different studies about the same issue when studies measure different indicators in different ways or do not fully or consistently report their data. Data that can't be used is, I would suggest the ultimate fieldwork fail. If you want a good laugh, have a look at the fieldwork fail hashtag and book which sadly features me running around at Ugandan Forest, Sammy Naked. More seriously though, the upshot of all this is that many decisions in policy and practice are informed by the results of individual studies which are often later contradicted by the findings of subsequent research. Now, a large group of us are currently tackling this through a collaboration with the International Tropical Peatland Center and input from around 50 researchers from every major tropical peatland in the world. Our goal is ambitious. We want to change the way peatland's data is collected and reported around the world so that more and more people collect data on the same variables in ways that can be synthesized. Ultimately, the goal is to facilitate meta-analysis that can enable more evidence-based policy and practice. I'm coordinating a team with Cal Stewart and Dylan Young from the universities of Newcastle and Leeds and the Global Peatlands Initiative to standardize the collection of environmental data so it can be combined from multiple studies and sites to better inform policy and practice. After trialling the process in UK peatlands, we've now replicated it for tropical peatlands and hope to extend the approach to other peatlands around the world in future. A number of those present here on the webinar met in Indonesia earlier last year to identify the key indicators that should be measured in tropical peatlands. This year, then, we supplemented these variables and went through a prioritization process with the tropical peatland research community to identify the most important indicators or core outcome measures, as we're calling them, that the majority of experts agree need to be measured if we want to understand the health of our tropical peatlands. The analysis of our tropical data will be completed next week, and I can send that to anyone who's interested. But to give you a feel for what this might look like, here are the most important climatic indicators that were prioritized for the measurement in the UK. What we call in this approach, the climate core outcome set. Looking at the first five rows in the list here, you can, it's not the first five, the first five that are rated green on the right-hand side of the screen. You can see that there is strong agreement that we need to measure rate of peat accumulation. That's a hard word to say. Peatland extent and peat composition, great. So far, so good. These will be in the core set of key indicators we will recommend for measurement in the UK. However, there's less agreement over the importance of measuring, say, peat buildup behind dams or dust losses. That doesn't mean that those indicators shouldn't ever be measured. If they're important for your particular study, then of course you should prioritize them, but you will do so in the knowledge that there may be few others measuring these. And as a result, there is less likelihood that your data may be used in future meta analysis to inform wider policy and practice. The next step is to move to methods and we're identifying reliable methods that could be used to collect data for each of the priority indicators, ranging from highly accurate, but expensive and time consuming methods that are the domain of researchers to methods that can be used by non-researchers and those with limited resources. As Ravi said earlier on, this is really important if we want to engage communities in citizen science, or if we want to enable practitioners and other organizations with limited resources to collect reliable data on the key variables that have been prioritized. Before I finish, I'd like to do a quick pitch for the Global Peatlands Initiative research working group. We'll be launching a call for new members in the next few weeks. So give me your email address. If Tanya can put this into the chat for us now, then you can click on the link and complete the survey. It's just one field, so very quick. And you'll get also access to a training program which is open to all peatland researchers starting with a session in December on writing more competitive funding goods. You'll get a research agenda that we've put together with key unanswered peatland research questions and a list of potential funders and a report detailing the 50 most recent peatland research projects that have been funded are under review or are in development around the world. And of course, if you have your own projects, you want to answer that email me, I would love to add that to the list. So get in touch by giving me your email address and that is a great way of staying in touch with this work and I'll also be updating this group with the work that we're doing on these core outcomes sets or key indicators. So finally, to conclude, I think if we're serious about evidence-based policy and practice, initiatives like this are of crucial importance. This initiative won't instantly enable us to harmonize data to create accurate global peatlands maps, although I'd love it if it could. It's not gonna provide evidence synthesis to support the next decision that you need to make, but we must stop and think about how we collect and report data now if we want the data we collect to enable more evidence-based policy and practice in years to come. Thank you, Professor Reed. That was bang on time. I'm really impressed. I hope other speakers will also follow suit and thank you for sharing all the interesting ideas and I know you have done this kind of exercise so we all can learn from there. So moving on to our next speaker of this session, we have Dr. Crystal Hargulash. She is a senior scientist with C4's Climate Change Energy and Low-Carbon Development Group. Crystal has more than 15 years of experience conducting research on climate change mitigation in tropical countries, including Indonesia, Peru, Costa Rica. She studies biogeochemical impacts of forest degradation and land use changes on greenhouse gas fluxes and how this affects the carbon stocks. Today she will be sharing her knowledge on peatlands, particularly talking about how do we monitor tropical peatlands and greenhouse gas emissions and whether our current knowledge is sufficient? What can we do? How can we use it? So more details from Crystal. Over to you, Crystal. Thank you. Thank you, Rupesh, for the introduction and good day everyone. I'm very pleased to participate in this webinar on criteria and indicators for tropical peatland restoration. In my talk, I will present our state of knowledge on peat-greenhouse gas emissions from land use and land use change in the tropics and their controls and we'll underline some critical gaps. So tropical peatlands play a prominent role as a global carbon pool with an estimated worldwide carbon stock of 350 tons of carbon in the soil, which excludes large stocks in the vegetation, especially in forests. Christine Pittsburgh Forest of Indonesia store 200 tons of carbon per hectare in the phytonas and about twice as much per meter of peat. These tremendous amounts of carbon stored in soils result from higher litter inputs than decay losses in anoxic conditions over the long term. Emissions of greenhouse gases from the peat arise from a range of activities and microbiological processes, which vary according to vegetation cover and environmental dynamics. Peat carbon dioxide emissions originate from net peat decomposition loss called on-site CO2 emissions in the IPCC guidelines. This loss is the balance between carbon entering the peat through little fondant root mortality and carbon exiting by microbial decomposition of the organic matter, which is also called soil heterotrophic respiration. CO2 is also lost via dissolved carbon exports and through fires. Nitrous oxide emissions stand from peat decomposition and from nitrogen application in fertilized systems. Finally, methane emissions form from soils through microbial decomposition and fires, but also from ditches. So this figure shows the complexity of the mechanisms underlying peat greenhouse gas emissions and the efforts that are needed to account for all of them. I will now present some results for Southeast Asia based on our contribution to the 2013 IPCC guidelines and additional research. In the region, pristine peat swarm forests act on average as a small greenhouse gas sink with larger on-site CO2 uptakes than accumulated losses from nitrous oxide and methane emissions and DOC exports. The average budget of greenhouse gases may be very different in regions of the Amazon basin, where we and others measured very large emissions of methane with a budget therefore highly dominated by these greenhouse gas, as you can see in the bottom figure. After drainage and conversion, peat soils become very large sources of greenhouse gases, especially in land uses such as acacia plantations or annual crop plants, including rice fields. The greenhouse gas budget is dominated by CO2 except in sheltering systems such as sagopal plantations. But our knowledge on the scale of greenhouse gas emissions from tropical peat soils remains incomplete and preliminary. For instance, the nitrous oxide emission factors of the IPCC used for combining the greenhouse gas budgets in my former slide likely underestimates substantially actual emission rates from peat decomposition. These factors were based on very limited N2O flux data of low magnitude while large emission rates have been recorded since then. As you can see on this figure, the contribution of N2O to peat greenhouse gas budgets is 2% using IPCC emission factors. Whereas when we consider instead the large emissions from peat decomposition observed in all plantations in Indonesia, this contribution goes up to 12 to 15%. Furthermore, emissions in degraded labs that are undrained also proved to be substantial. We measure peat greenhouse gas fluxes in undrained primary and secondary forests in Indonesia and found a peat greenhouse gas budgets warm order of magnitude larger in secondary forest than in primary forest. Results show that secondary forests emitted much more CO2 but also nitrous oxide than primary forests. In the Peruvian Amazon, we looked at how sustainable forest management affected peat greenhouse gas fluxes and found peat greenhouse gas emissions in highly degraded conditions, twice the emission measured in pristine conditions. And what happens after we wait in a drain site? As you can see on the right side of the figure, the peat remains a source of greenhouse gas according to assumptions as we currently lack data. On site CO2 emissions and nitrous oxide emissions were assumed to be zero by the IPCC while dissolved carbon exports and methane emissions were assumed to be similar to labels in pristine conditions. And what happens after restoration? There are no data and no assessment either as emissions will highly depend on the type of restoration that is implemented. We need proxies for a cost-efficient monitoring of different types of activities conducted in peatlands. These proxies are typically derived from a process-based modeling or more empirical approaches. In both cases, solid, long-term and consistent data sets are required. As an example, we can cite the soil-CN ratio, which is used to scale nitrous oxide emissions from drained forest histosols to national labels in freedom. Notwithstanding, identifying generic proxies is difficult as key controls of greenhouse gas fluxes may vary among land uses and drainage practices. For instance, while methane fluxes are chiefly controlled by the water table labeled in and drain systems, this is not the case in drained land uses. Furthermore, different processes are governed by different controls. So for monitoring on-site pH CO2 emissions, which result from microbial decomposition and plant-related processes, it is not straightforward to determine which proxies would be the most suitable. For this emission factor, which is critical as it contributes importantly to peak greenhouse gas budgets, the best option for identifying proxies would be to conduct process-based modeling. Finally, another difficulty in defining adequate proxies arises from lack of data because some key controls of greenhouse gases are seldom reported, such as, for instance, mineral nitrogen contents and dynamics. I would like to finalize my presentation with some take-home messages. We need more data on peak greenhouse gas emissions and their controlling factors for the tropics. Notably, we need to conduct research to understand the rates before and after reweighting and restoration. We also need more research outside of Southeast Asia. We need good quality data. As we noted these recent years, a tendency towards short-term experiments with low measurement frequency. Finally, we need to process-based model peak greenhouse gas fluxes in the tropics for enhanced understanding of the complex and interactive processes and adequate identification of easily measurable and reliable proxies. I thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Crystal. That was also exactly on time. So I'm very pleased. Thank you so much for providing all this detailed nuances when we are studying or conducting research in peatlands and trying to identify when or how they work as sinks of sources. So these are very important topics to keep in mind, particularly when we are looking at the criteria indicator approaches. And we will have, I think, very rich discussion at the end. So I would not spend much time here and I will go directly to our next speaker. I'll introduce Professor Gusti Ansari. He is a professor and chair of the master's program of environment and soil science department at Tanjumpura University in Indonesia. He's an expert in tropical peatland ecosystems and has published a large number of scientific publications related to these unique ecosystems and broadly on climate change issues. Today, he will be sharing his insights and he will be talking about a framework for restoring degraded tropical peat swamp forests. So the floor is yours, Professor Gusti Ansari. Thank you very much, Rupesh. Good afternoon and good morning for everybody. I'm glad to be here to give this presentation. Thank you very much for this opportunity. Let me share my screen. Can I have my screen? Yes, perfect. Go ahead. So the title of my presentation is Change to Be a Framework for Restoring Degreed Tropical Peat Swamp Forest. So I would like to emphasize tropical peat swamp forest is very unique because it's a forest. So just fall in South Asia, Congo and Amazon. So the size may be around 38 to 40 million hectares. But in Indonesia is the largest tropical peat swamp forest in Southeast Asia. So covering maybe around the latest data by the government on the 13.4 million hectares. Previously, we might have until 20 million hectares of tropical peat swamp forest occurring in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua. So the interesting thing, the more the non-tropical and tropical peat peatland ecosystem contains black water. But in the tropical peat forest, the black water contains a lot of aquatic fauna, in particular a lot of fish species. Organic meters of wood de-vegetation compared to the sphagnum biomass in the non-tropical peat. And vegetation communities adapting to inundation and also poor soil fertility. So as you know, the main function of these tropical peat swamp forest is our water storage because it's considered as wetlands and also as Crystal already described as a carbon sink. And also important here, provision of timber and other economic goods. And also habitat for wildlife is the most important, just like Orangutan. Also, so you can see this Orangutan on the graded tropical peat swamp forest in Katapang because of land use changes here. So this destroy their habitat and also change the peat properties. Also change our peat hydrology. And also degrees of degradation of tropical peat swamp forest is really dependent on the resource extractive regime. But as you know that most of our tropical peat swamp forest is acceptably or continuously locked all over Indonesia. So the underlying cause of the peat degradation in Indonesia, first of all of course deforestation for different purposes, from timber also to comfort the forest into agriculture of drainage and also planting the tropical peat with introduced plant species in agriculture like oil palm, other crops. So these are simpler degrees of degradation. This is not really good indicator maybe, but just enough. So selective timber removal without drainage, maybe the degree is low but Crystal said it's a very high emission. Selective timber removal with manual and shallow drainage maybe medium or intermediate, clean cutting, deep drainage and significant land cover change into shrub and culture uses and planted monocultures will be high degradation degrees. So this is a very qualitative statement. So what are the restoration options of degraded peat are not easy and also can be not cheap but should be manageable or affordable I agree with Professor Ravi. So that's why we need to determine the restoration priority. In fact the objective of restoration is to facilitate tropical peat forest as a super organization to refurbish both economic and tropical ecological function. So for example this is a restoration option, the first priority maybe on Andrain log offer secondary peat forest. As you know why I mentioned Andrain log offer secondary peat forest most all of tropical forest in Indonesia I would say is already locked. So in log offer secondary peat forest we can hope to do natural vegetation regeneration and planting enrichment if possible and the second priority maybe drain log offer secondary peat forest and of course because there is drainage we need to do canal blocking or refilling and also we should promote natural vegetation regeneration and also we do some planting enrichment. Most difficult the forest peat and other drain peat. So we need construction due to some construction of hydrological engineering. So we need to have a water table monitoring replanting native species also in particular on protected peat. It's very difficult to replanting trees on the graded peatland in Indonesia because we cannot find enough material seed material. So these are adopted from FAO restoration framework. So for example restoration on drain log of tropical peat forest we need to define the objective. For example here to restore a high ground water table and to pass limited natural regeneration processes. So of course we need to have a mean of activities or management. We need to do the mapping. We need to assess the water balance. We need to have the hydrological construction plan and we do vegetation analysis and also we can including a planting arrangement and then we need to evaluate also what are those. For example measurement of the ground water table maybe twice a year or maybe more or maybe every week it depends on their context. We need to measure soil moisture maybe during the dry and wet season and of course we need to measure subsidence range maybe once a year and analysis of natural vegetation regeneration maybe once a year or once every five years or other things or maybe measurement of carbon stock and so on. And of course very important to have the validation. We need to have the online availability of reporting and supplement data in order to encourage public access. For example the forest because it belongs to the state okay. Okay this is my last slide in conclusion. So restoration of the grid pit is a very long term program can be more than 10 years and restoration programs consist of yeah specific objective means of detailed activities evaluation any characters and tool reporting means of validation. I think that's all my presentation. Thank you very much for your attention. I go give back to you Rufes. Thank you Fagusti. Thank you for finishing your presentation also a little bit before time. So I'm very thankful for all the speakers of this session and now we have some time left for discussion. What I was planning on doing is to just pose a couple of questions myself to sort of get the discussion get started and then we can also revisit some of the questions that our audience have asked and then depending on time you can address that. So I'm sort of trying to give a couple of I would say questions in a general rather than focusing in it to particular speaker but as a summary of this session and please feel free to answer respond to my thoughts as you think that you can answer. So what we heard today was kind of a broad range of topics which are obviously coming from biophysical aspects but the idea was sorry sorry I had a timer set so you finished before. So the broad set of criteria and indicators and how we can fit this data that we have collected that we have into these kind of criteria and indicators. So Professor Reed shared how this idea of having good data may not help in synthesizing because somewhere there is a difference in measurement, somewhere the data is not reported. So how do you reconcile that? What are the mechanisms and how we go about it? And then Crystal showed in her presentation that can we use proxies like modeling as one of the approach to fill up those gaps. And then Professor Gusti Ansari shared how the restoration when we're talking about PTA restoration it's a long term exercise and it needs to to be based on specific objectives which are followed with good practice monitoring and validation. So this was a very very good kind of a summary of these topics and you share a lot of information. My question is directly how do you go about doing it in terms of when you have those very many approaches of data collection reporting and all that? How do you distill it into simple people-centric criteria and indicators? And I'm going back to what Trevi mentioned that people should be the focus. People who are implementing it, it has to be simple and the idea of having good enough approaches. So how do you go about it in practical sense? Anyone? Crystal, Professor Reed, Professor Gusti Ansari? Yeah. Yeah, ultimately I think there are two approaches to this. There is a top-down approach and a bottom-off approach. I think both are equally valid. So the initiative that my colleagues and I have been working on is a top-down approach to this that we start with the science. What is the full range of possible criteria and indicators available that are known to science? Can we then using scientific expertise get this to a priority list of ones which we know are accurate and reliable and necessary to measure? And then the second stage is that we then look at methods for measuring each of those. And we're looking now for the scientific methods which will be highly accurate, but perhaps time-consuming and expensive through to perhaps proxy methods that could be used by citizen scientists and practitioners. And we then have a menu of different methods accessible to different people for each of those indicators. The bottom-off approach suggests starting with the communities themselves and asking the question, how do you know if a peatland is healthy or unhealthy, degraded, restored? And from my own experience of doing this in various different contexts, you get incredible information from these people which overlaps significantly with the scientific understanding. And now you have a subset of the scientific indicators that we know that we also know are currently already understood and measured by local communities. And I'll put a link in the question and answer to a paper that I wrote on how to do that. And my PhD in fact was primarily on this community-based indicator measurement. It is possible. Okay, thank you. Anything to add, Crystal or? Yes, can I? Yes, please. So, I would suggest to go through education. So, we have an experience with the private company in Ketapan. So, first, we try to as a primary school to educate what the peatland is there because they don't know what are the peatland because they don't have the subject. And through this education, we ask them to do the camping and then we replant the trees. And then we hope that later on they could also monitor the tree growth and to study the peatlands because we really need to change the perspective on the peatlands because in other domain because peatland is just used for planting oil palm or other crops. So, here it is important to restore the peatland and the peatland restoration should become a daily talk among the communities in the local. So, it's very, well, in next time, yeah, so next time. So, you're advocating changing of behavior through awareness and communication. That's a very, very valid point. I think that we touched on this quite, you know, clearly in this keynote. Crystal, any thoughts? You are muted by the way. So, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, thank you, Rupert. I agree with Gusti that capacity, but building and communication is very, very important. And I can see the difference between Indonesia and Peru. In Peru, policymakers, practitioners, students are not even aware about the huge amount of carbon that is stored in these peatlands. And so, it's very important. And also this video that was shown to us before with journalists being brought to the field to learn about and afterwards to communicate about peatlands is very important. The next thing is about, you know, using different methods or how different methods are applied and how to combine the results. Of course, it's always a bit tricky. And for instance, when we combine emission factors for the IPCC, we had to use results from different methods. And I can cite what I presented, the flux difference approach and subsidence also, which gives very different types of results that we had to combine. And we had to use the expert judgment several times to be able to combine these different results from different methods. Thank you. Thank you, Crystal. Yeah, so that was very, very good and succinct response. I'm very happy. This is a very invigorating discussion. There are a few questions that have come in our question and answer box. I was trying to monitor them, look at them. So there were initial questions for Ravi. Unfortunately, Ravi's connection was disrupted due to heavy rain in Goa. So he could not be in the meeting. But we have sent these questions over email and he will be responding to those either before our session runs out and we'll post it here. But he has already. So that's good. So now for this session, there are questions which were, a couple of them were directed to Professor Reed and to Crystal. And I think they are kind of specific in terms of your paper and publications and modeling. So if you don't mind typing them in, I think that would be good. There's one interesting question. I will touch that and we'll have quick short discussion and then we'll move on to session two. One question was regarding fire. So I just want to mention our next session covers fire aspects. So please stay tuned. We will be talking about fire in our next session. And the question is from a gentleman, Abhinandan Saikia. He's asking whether we need to, to discard the notion of best practices and in place we can perhaps use something like local, local based pragmatic information, keeping in mind the importance of collective wisdom and scientifically rigor, vigor. So what he's, I think, saying is to blending these two aspects together where, which is also what we have been sort of discussing and advocating as a part of our approaches that these criteria indicators who will be using and how we can bring together. So that is very much true. But I'm not 100% sure whether I can really say whether it's better to use best practices or it's better to use local based pragmatic information. I think at the end of the day, if you think about it, pragmatic means what is in, in practice. And when it's local based information, which is combining scientific vigor and local wisdom, then it will obviously be best practices. That is my take. But if you have any, anything to add, very quick, very briefly, 30 second age. Anyone, Paik Daniel or any, any of our panelists? I've written a few papers about how to combine local and scientific knowledge of indicators. I'll put them into the question and answer. But there are methods for doing this. The key message is that we can't romanticize and accept unquestioningly all local knowledge equally. We should not unquestioningly accept what we all think is received wisdom in the academic world as well. All need to be tested and weighed before deciding what actually will work. And you can combine the two knowledge bases, it is possible. Great. Any parting thoughts before we officially kind of end session one and move to session two? Before you move to session two, Rupesh, can I read what Ravi answered to the questions? Yes, please. That would be great. Okay. I think the gentleman who asked question to Ravi was about the communication. He is Mr. Margianto. What kind of communication means would be very effective to do this kind of work? And Ravi responds that based on his experience, using the local language is very important. So if we have scientists working in the field, make sure they can also understand at least clues about the local languages. And then the means can be video, can be radio, sorry, or even TV. So video is good, especially for communication with farmer to farmer type of video. So that's very, very effective. And the second question is related to the principle about good enough is better than perfect. Ravi respond is about optimizing the cost that is going to be spent to do this kind of work. So adding one digital decimal point in the numbers is not that important compared with a huge amount of cost that will accrue from this kind of exercise. So make sure if it is good enough, that's fine. No need to be too perfect. That's it. Thank you, Padunyan. So I again thank my esteemed panelist members to share their wisdom knowledge in this session. It was a very informative session.