Kampung Mak Jintan in Terengganu is a place of fire and floods.

In mid-August, bald, charred trees stood like phone poles on the northern end of the village. A fire had razed the area a few months ago. But in the dark brown soil, green shrubs had sprouted, feasting on the sunlight.

Many villagers own a hectare of oil palm each. Leaning on an oil palm in a plot next to the charred trees, a villager pointed north. The fire had burnt the palms there too, he said. Many of their palms look stunted with browning fronds.

For Mak Jintan villagers, the months of January through April bring searing heat that sucks the moisture from the open land and sparse forests. Thirsty trees shed their leaves. A spark and the dead leaves burn. The fire leaps from the ground to the trees to the oil palms.

Grey skies are a common sight and smoke a common smell.

Then, in November, monsoon rains submerge the land in waist-high water. Week-long floods inundate the paddy fields, farms, and estates around Kampung Mak Jintan. The village turns into an "island", locals told Macaranga.

Yet, despite the cycles of fire and floods, a plantation company wants to grow a lot more oil palm there.

Pure Green Development Sdn Bhd has picked a 2,200ha forested site next to Kampung Mak Jintan. The Terengganu state government supports the project and has leased the land to the company for 99 years. Pure Green Development now needs only the federal Department of Environment to approve its project environmental impact assessment (EIA) report before it can clear the site.

But scientists and the Malaysian Palm Oil Board have criticised the project for its blow to Malaysia’s climate target.

The site contains about 1,000 ha of virgin peat swamp, according to the National Forest Inventory (2010—2013). Scientists told Macaranga that the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest is the only virgin one they know of in Peninsular Malaysia. All other peat swamp forests have been logged or drained.

Peat swamp forests, especially intact ones, trap enormous amounts of carbon in their soil. But logging would unleash much of this carbon into the air and warm the world further. The damage is irreversible.

Carbon trapped for ages

"Why don't you eat the soil?" suggested the tour guide to Stephanie Evers on her first visit to a Malaysian peat swamp forest. She has been studying tropical peat swamps since the early 2010s. The guide egged her on: "It's like antibiotics."

Evers cautiously licked the dark brown soil. The honorary associate professor at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia, recalls that it tasted "muddy, not offensive, not gritty. Gentle on the tongue."

Peat soil is organic matter that has accumulated over millennia in watery conditions. The organic matter clumps like a sponge, with water filling the pores.

Over scores of millennia, peat soil in parts of Southeast Asia has stacked up to more than 6 storeys high.

Most of these peatlands are found in Indonesia and Malaysia. They have trapped in their belowground stores 68 gigatonnes of carbon – as much as Indonesia and Malaysia would emit for 23 years.

And how much carbon might be locked in the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest inside Pure Green Development's project site?

Nearly 500,000 tonnes, according to Pure Green Development's EIA report. However, the report counted only tree biomass and not soil carbon. That omission is "completely wrong" for calculating the carbon stock of peat swamp forests, says Lahiru Wijedasa, a tropical peatland scientist at conservation outfit BirdLife International. "In peat soil, most of the carbon is belowground."

Macaranga has not found a comprehensive peat soil study of the site. Still, a few studies allow for a back-of-envelope estimation.

In 2017, Evers' team sampled a plot on the western edge of the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest. They found the peat to be 2 m deep. Then, in 2020, WWF-Malaysia used satellite images to map the extent of the peat swamp forest there. Macaranga analysed the maps and found that Pure Green Development's project site includes about 900 ha of peat swamp forest. Non-peat forests and swamps cover the rest of the site.

These figures led Evers to conservatively estimate that the project site contains nearly 1.4 million tonnes of carbon in its peat soil. Mak Jintan has nearly as much carbon as the people of Kuala Terengganu city would emit for 4 years and 4 months.

However, this vault of belowground carbon can be unlocked with a simple key: digging ditches to drain the water from the peat soil. And that is disastrous for the climate.

Dry peatlands are bad for the climate

When developers want to exploit a peat swamp forest, they must first drain it. That sets off a chain-effect of rapid decomposition and frequent fires. Non-peatland species muscle out the native ones. Eventually, the peat swamp forest ceases to exist. The consequence: gargantuan amount of carbon emission and the Earth warms up.

When water leaves the peat soil, air seeps in, and the buried organic matter touches oxygen for the first time in centuries. Fueled by oxygen, decomposition skyrockets. Large amounts of carbon dioxide escape into the sky. The blanket of greenhouse gases that warms the Earth thickens.

As the peat decomposes, it sinks. In the first 5 years, a drained peatland that is waist-high would collapse to the toes. Every year after, it continues to drop about 5 cm, or the length of a pinky finger, "until there is no peat left," says Lahiru.

And suppose the dry layers of organic matter catch fire. This is common during the dry seasons. They would burn relentlessly underground, spouting enormous volumes of carbon and ash. Fires in drained peat swamps have blanketed Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore in prolonged haze for decades.

Worryingly, once a tropical peat swamp forest begins to drain, there is no practical way to restore its capacity to capture and store carbon. That is because draining removes the condition that drives the entire peat swamp ecosystem: being water-logged.

Digging the first ditch marks the start of the collapse of the ecosystem. An intact peat swamp forest tends to have surface water a few centimetres deep. It nurtures native plants and microbes that have chemicals that slow decomposition. But when peat soil dries, it turns hostile for its native species.

The new oxygenated and dry environment attracts new species. These newcomers continue to change the environment, speed up decomposition, and push the ecosystem further away from that of a peat swamp forest.

For example, Evers' team has found that about 25 years after the North Selangor peat swamp forest was last drained and logged, it still emits twice as much carbon as the intact Mak Jintan peat swamp forest.

Furthermore, an oil palm plantation emits more carbon than a peat swamp forest. The extra emission varies widely across studies, though the Malaysian Palm Oil Council cited a range of 40—95 tonnes per hectare yearly. Evers had examined new to mature oil palm plantations that had replaced peat swamp forests in Selangor and found them to emit on average 90 tonnes of carbon per hectare yearly.

Evers’ result suggests that converting the 900ha Mak Jintan peat swamp forest alone would release as much carbon a year as 10,000 Malaysians. And after a 30-year cycle of oil palm planting, the project would have released as much carbon as 300,000 Malaysians.

As big as these figures are, they describe only a portion of the climate impact of Pure Green Development’s project. That is because more than half of the project site is non-peat forests. Destroying those forests would emit a lot of carbon too.

At odds with the country and industry

The global palm oil industry is aware of the climate impact of its expansion in peatland. Both buyers and sellers of palm oil have established policies and regulations to stop converting forests and peatlands.

In Malaysia, the Ministry of Plantation and Commodities has reiterated the country's position against deforestation in the palm oil supply chain. Regulators enforce the "no deforestation, no peatland, no exploitation" (NDPE) approach via the mandatory Malaysia Sustainable Palm Oil certification (MSPO). This standard prohibits planting oil palm in natural forests starting from 2020.

In the Pure Green Development project EIA report, the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB), the national industry regulator, warned sternly against exploiting the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest.

The project "goes against the [NDPE] commitment and would be environmentally very damaging – especially when the evidence is so clear," wrote MPOB in the review section of the report.

In addition, MPOB told Macaranga that “Malaysia maintains a firm stance against the conversion of natural forests and peatland into oil palm plantations”. It added that if the project goes ahead, the marketability of the Malaysian palm oil industry was on the line.

“It may threaten the Malaysian position under the European Deforestation Regulation .” The regulation (EUDR) is a trade regulation that bans deforestation-linked products from the EU market. It comes into effect at the end of this year, on 30 December 2024. MPOB warns that the project could prompt regulators to label Malaysia as “high risk of deforestation” and impose stricter inspection on Malaysian exports.

However, MPOB noted that it has limited authority to stop planters from cutting forests. Under MSPO, planters can expand into peatland if state governments authorise it. In the Pure Green Development EIA report, MPOB said that solutions to land matter issues depend on the "synergy" between the state and federal governments.

Neither the Terengganu Chief Minister's office nor the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability (NRES) answered Macaranga's questions.

However, Malaysiakini reported the NRES Minister Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad saying that his ministry "will obviously monitor [Pure Green Development's project] closely and continue to communicate with the state government about the implications of whatever decision they take."

As for Pure Green Development, its EIA report said it "has adopted NDPE principles" to operate in an "environmentally sustainable manner". How it would do so is unclear. Almost all its project site is forested, and its EIA report did not mention sparing any of the forests.

Pure Green Development and its directors did not answer Macaranga's questions.

Immediate, local concerns

Draining the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest could aggravate more immediate disasters than global warming. Malaysiakini reported that government agencies are concerned that the project would reduce water supply, destroy biodiversity, and make fires more likely. Another disaster is the yearly floods, though this year a new concern is troubling Abdul Rahman bin Salleh, the Kampung Mak Jintan village chief.

Every December, sometimes as early as November, monsoon storms flood the area around Kampung Mak Jintan. At its worst, "the water would swallow your vehicle," says Abdul Rahman. The village's only boat went missing last year, and he has yet to replace it. He frowns at the thought of having to raise the cash to buy a new boat.

These floods will likely worsen if the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest is cleared, says peatland scientist Lahiru. The forest softens the blow of the rain and slows the run-off. Peat soil, though saturated with water, could help absorb some of the rainfall. In contrast, without forest cover, the exposed topsoil would harden into a water-resistant layer.

The locals do not mind if the forests stay untouched. But they also told Macaranga that they welcome the jobs that come with a new oil palm plantation. However, they do feel disempowered. "It's a project of the raja-raja, how would our opinion matter?" one villager asked. They only demand that the project leave their existing property alone. They cannot fathom how the loss of the peat swamp forest might lead to worse floods and fires.

How to make money preserving Mak Jintan

Pure Green Development said in the EIA report it wants to run an "environmentally sustainable" project. Considering the project's certain and drastic climate impact and the strong protests from scientists and the palm oil industry regulators, what sustainable alternatives are available for the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest?

The scientists Macaranga spoke to suggest that it is possible to enrich the state and nation without damaging the environment.

Firstly, the state government could gazette the 2,220ha site as a forest reserve. The Terengganu State Forestry Enactment stipulates that the government should replace, where possible, the forest reserves it had removed.

But Terengganu had removed 15,000 ha more reserves than it had added in the last 20 years. Gazetting the virgin peat swamp forest would start to shrink the gap, not least to replace the loss of the adjacent Belara forest reserve that was removed in 2017.

Petr Hedenec, a soil ecologist at University Malaysia Terengganu, suggests protecting the virgin peat swamp forest for ecotourism and research. He believes that peat swamp forests and their unique communities of animals and plants would attract tourists.

But compared to the peatlands in Europe and North America, scientists have barely studied the aboveground biodiversity of tropical peatlands; what lives underground is an even bigger mystery.

Still, Hedenec has done some preliminary surveys of life in peat soil, and found high biodiversity: mites, springtails, ants, termites, and microbes.

Meanwhile, Evers sees peatland as a huge potential reserve of biopharmaceuticals. Microbes competing in harsh conditions have likely evolved biochemicals new to science. But "if you lose that soil, you lose the chance to find the next big antibiotic or antifungal," she says.

There is also the option of generating carbon credits from the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that saving the 900ha peat swamp from conversion into oil palm would generate carbon credits worth RM85 million over the 30-year cycle of an oil palm planting.

Many more carbon credits could be generated and sold if the entire 2,200ha site is considered. "So, you could do a carbon project, avoid the conversion, and get the money for doing nothing more than a bit of restoration," says Lahiru.

Ultimately, the fate of the Mak Jintan peat swamp forest rests in the hands of the Terengganu state government. Much of the forest sits on state land, which can be cleared anytime, even if it is not for oil palms.

Fortunately, the state government appears eager for climate action. It is gearing up to develop a national hub to capture and store carbon in its offshore oil and gas facilities.

If the government looks not seaward, but inland towards its swamps, it will find natural assets that have been capturing and storing carbon effectively for free.

All Terengganu needs is to do as it says on the signs of its forest reserves: Sayangi Hutan.