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Partners & Projects

Indonesia: Burn Free Movement

Project Date:

March 2020 – March 2024

Partners:

Farmers' Initiatives for Ecological Livelihoods and Democracy (FIELD)

Background

Open biomass burning is a major health and environmental hazard. It involves the open burning of field residues after crop harvesting, as well as grass and other organic cuttings in agricultural settings. Agriculture is one of the largest industries in Indonesia and agricultural biomass burning has become a major issue, contributing significant emissions and pollution.

According to the United Nations FAO statistics, Indonesia utilises 32% of its land for agricultural production. The sector encompasses large plantations, state-owned or private farms, and smallholders. Driven by multiple factors including burning residue crops or deliberate land clearing for plantations, open burning now represents one of the main sources of air pollution in Indonesia. In fact, agriculture account for a staggering 7.8% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Beyond being a driver of global heating emissions, this practice has led to several related challenges, including ecosystem destruction, soil imbalance, the continuous loss of soil nutrients, and increased risk of wildfires.

Besides this, there are a multitude of adverse impacts on human health stemming from pollution. Exposure to biomass-burning particulate matter is associated with negative outcomes on health, from higher risks of respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, to cancer and overall mortality rates.

To address these issues at the interconnection of sustainability and health, EarthCare Foundation partnered with Indonesian nonprofit Farmers’ Initiatives for Ecological Livelihoods and Democracy (FIELD) to raise the awareness of and reduce the practice of open burning among the country’s smallholder farms and grassroots communities.

Project Features

From March 2020 to March 2024, ECF supported the work of FIELD, a nonprofit accelerating the burn-free movement in Indonesia. The work was mainly concentrated in the Sumatra and Kalimantan regions.
To reduce the practice of open biomass burning, the project targeted smallholders, farmers and grassroots agricultural workers and provided technical education on alternative farming methods. Training programmes offered practical knowledge of how to employ methods such as no-tillage seeding and mulching to reduce the need to disturb the soil and conserve the natural environment.
One of the unique aspects of this programme is its attention paid to local contexts. Through context analyses at the beginning of the project, agronomic solutions were tailored according to the specific conditions and needs of the targeted sites. These findings laid the basis for interventions and training workshops held with the community. Further recommendations were also sought from a team of behavioural scientists to direct the training content and educational curriculum provided to the beneficiaries.
Aligned with ECF’s values in prioritising holistic approaches, this project took into account social, psychological and environmental impacts, as well as behavioural principles, with the view of achieving meaningful behavioural change.

Project Outcomes

As a result of four years of work, the incidence of biomass burning in Sumatra and Kalimantan saw declines. Numerous other positive environmental effects were recorded, including an increased soil drought tolerance and enhanced soil composition health.
In tandem with environmental impacts, these interventions brought significant social, health and community-level benefits too. Local maize and rice crops, as well as cash crops like eggplants and beans saw jumps in yields as a result of adopting no-tillage and mulching techniques. Farmer trials of burn free methods also showed a 100% increase in rice crop yields compared with conventional practices.
Given these positive outcomes, many producers, from local farming communities to larger stakeholders and farm owners, began adopting sustainable farming approaches, generating the incremental phasing out of open burning in Indonesia’s agriculture sector.