When discussing the careers of women leaders, there’s a phenomenon referred to as the “glass cliff.” A relative of the term glass ceiling, the “glass cliff” is when a company is in trouble and a female leader is put in charge to save it. The notion suggests that when women are finally given a chance to prove themselves in a senior position, they are handed something that is already broken where the chances of failure are high. One might argue that women thrive as leaders in times of crisis – but why must we wait until times of crisis to showcase women’s leadership?

In recent studies of countries and states in the U.S. where women leaders have been more successful than their male counterparts at reducing COVID-19 transmission, unbalanced levels of women’s leadership have been connected with greater risks of creating COVID-19 response plans that do not consider the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women and girls, and of failing to implement policies that support them, according to CARE.  Well beyond heads of state, women’s leadership has contributed significantly to managing the pandemic in schools, communities, workplaces and homes.

After attending school for the first time at an accelerated schooling center in Mali made possible by a Winrock project, Sali Kassogue now attends a government school. Photo: Winrock International

Despite what we have seen in terms of a formidable response from women’s leadership during the pandemic, systemic barriers, gender bias, discrimination and gender stereotypes still pack a devastating blow. An estimated 132 million girls are not attending school (though Winrock is doing its part to ensure that they do so), and, within the next decade, 140 million girls will be married before they reach the age of 18. In fact, if current trends persist, it will take an estimated 108 years to close the global gender gap.

Arkansas Women’s Business Center Director Chauncey Pettis, left, with two of the center’s clients. Photo: Dave Anderson

In addition to persistent pre-existing social and systemic barriers to women’s participation and leadership, new barriers have emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the world women are facing increased domestic violence, unpaid care duties, unemployment and poverty. Unfortunately, despite women making up a majority of front-line workers, there is disproportionate and inadequate representation of women in national and global COVID-19 policy spaces. In the context of our programming and organizational culture, the gap in women’s leadership must be prioritized in order to address long-term hurdles, such as:

• Workforce Participation. In September 2020, four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force in the United States (865,000 women compared with 216,000 men). In fact, one out of four women who reported becoming unemployed during the pandemic said it was because of a lack of childcare, twice the rate of men. Winrock recognizes the importance of family-forward workplace policies to address the challenges of this moment brought on by the pandemic and has sought to implement more flexibility for working parents’ caretaking responsibilities in our commitment to advancing gender equality.
• Climate Change. Women and girls have been leading climate action and environmental movements, but men still occupy 67 percent of climate-related decision-making roles. Women across the world are disproportionately affected by climate change, and climate-induced humanitarian disasters often worsen existing gender inequalities, leaving women and girls prone to higher rates of violence, malnutrition and more. In the context of our programming in climate change adaptation, we seek to empower women leaders in the climate movement so that solutions and responses to the climate emergency won’t continue to exclude women’s needs and undermine their rights.
• Agriculture. Women ensure food security and build climate resilience, but when it comes to owning land, accessing agricultural inputs, financing and technologies for climate resilience, they are left far behind. Since more than one-third of women’s employment is in agriculture, increasing women’s access to land and providing better support for women farmers is essential. Within our robust agriculture portfolio Winrock strives to promote women’s experience and insights to lead us all to a better understanding of managing scarce resources, promoting innovation and mitigating climate risks.
• Entrepreneurship and the Workplace. Despite a record-breaking new high of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies in 2020, only 7.4 percent of companies on the list are run by women, and women are less likely to be entrepreneurs (something Winrock works to counteract). Intersecting and multiple forms of discriminatory practices such as sexual harassment, the gender wage gap and lack of family-friendly policies at the workplace keep women from advancing in their careers and claiming leadership positions.
• Women’s Rights Organizations. Around the world, the space for civil discourse and movements is shrinking. Since 2008, civil society repression has deepened in 26 countries worldwide, thus creating obstacles for women’s organizations and movements to register, engage in advocacy and receive external funding in some countries. Winrock partners with women’s rights organizations because their role is critical in teaching the next generation the importance of gender equality and supporting girls’ activism.

Winrock’s African Women Leaders in Agriculture and the Environment program, of which these women were a part, awarded 570 African women scholarships for post-graduate training in agriculture, equipped over 1,500 women with leadership skills, enabled more than 50,000 girls to pursue their educations and provided training to 100,000 women farmers in new technologies.

Women stand at the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis, as health care workers, caregivers, innovators, community organizers and as some of the most exemplary and effective leaders in combating the pandemic. The crisis has highlighted both the centrality of their contributions and the disproportionate burdens that they carry.

Women have emerged as leaders of trafficking survivor groups, and they use their hard-won experience to educate and protect others. Photo: Misty Keasler

Our world will never be the same after COVID-19. If we are going to be realistic about building back better, we have to be honest about what’s broken now. COVID did not create new inequalities; it highlighted and exacerbated existing ones. What has been glaringly clear is that women, particularly women of color and women from low-income communities and from the Global South, do not have the same level of power and agency in their communities. To uphold women’s rights and fully leverage the potential of women’s leadership in pandemic preparedness and response, the perspectives of women and girls in all of their diversity must be integrated in the formulation and implementation of policies and programs.

As Shirley Chisholm, the first Black U.S. congresswoman and first Black majority party candidate to run for president once said: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” The future is better with women at every table where decisions are being made — from the kitchen table to the conference room table. We must continue to amplify women’s voices to ensure a future where women’s leadership is no longer an exception but the norm.

In 2018, under the USAID-funded Vietnam Forests and Deltas Project, Microsoft and Winrock began an exciting partnership. The goal: to harness data across environmental and social indicators to help the Government of Vietnam better understand the impact of its innovative Payments for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) system.

PFES pays upstream forest owners to maintain healthy forests, a unique example of private-sector engagement that benefits downstream water users such as hydroelectric power plants and industrial water users. To monitor PFES, the Vietnam Forest Protection and Development Fund (VNFF) initially only collected data on the number of households receiving PFES payments, the dollar value of those payments and the hectares of forests under the system. As the PFES system developed, Winrock, USAID and VNFF wanted a more robust way to capture the true impact of this work on the ecosystems and livelihoods of those involved.

VNFF set out on a multipronged effort to improve their overall PFES monitoring and evaluation system. They reviewed what data they wanted to collect, how they wanted to collect it, and how they could ensure all users access to the information they needed. VNFF and its provincial partners identified 28 indicators that could help capture the impact of the system and allow decision-makers to see the results of PFES on forests and forest communities. For example, VNFF will now be able to analyze forest loss data to compare areas where forest owners receive PFES payments and areas where they do not and track how PFES funds are distributed — whether to community-level forest patrols, local infrastructure development or community initiatives such as women-led savings funds.

Of course, collecting and compiling all this information is a major undertaking and so when Microsoft reached out to the project to see how it could help, there was a clear answer! Microsoft provided financial support and access to leading local software developers, who worked with Winrock and VNFF to develop the database infrastructure and data management system to allow VNFF to process the information they needed. As the PFES system in Vietnam is globally unique, the database infrastructure and management needed to be specifically tailored for this use, and Microsoft was crucial for the development of this system.

“USAID/Vietnam has been looking for opportunities to work with Microsoft, and it’s great that PFES monitoring provided an opportunity for successful private sector engagement,” said former USAID/Vietnam Mission Director Michael Greene.

In partnership with Winrock, VNFF finalized and institutionalized the National PFES M&E Guidelines to establish consistent monitoring and evaluation processes and procedures across all 44 provinces that participate in PFES. Using the new guidelines, Winrock and VNFF trained national and provincial-level staff on their roles and responsibilities in the new system.

“Thanks to the M&E system developed by VFD, Son La province can quantify PFES results and evaluate the effectiveness of the PFES policy. The new guidelines are essential to help other provinces navigate and institute their own M&E systems,” says Mr. Phung Huu Thu, who heads Son La Provincial Forest Protection and Development Fund’s M&E Department.

As the Winrock-Microsoft partnership moves forward, VNFF will have nuanced data on the impacts of the $130 million annual payments that move through the PFES system. And this will make PFES stronger for all who use it.

Jeremy Lakin

Jean-Pierre Rousseau

Winrock has worked in Tanzania across a variety of sectors over the past 40 years, and much of its work there over the last decade has been dedicated to improving water resource allocation and management to ensure sustainable, equitable access to water for all.

Water security has always been a priority for Tanzania, especially increasing access to drinking water. Since the introduction of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals in 2000, followed by the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, access to drinking water has more than doubled from 27 percent to 56 percent as of 2017. Though significant progress has been made, insufficient investment, poor operations and maintenance, and under-capacitated water governance institutions continue to hinder sustainable access to water. These challenges are the focus of Winrock’s approach to water security in Tanzania.

From the village level to the national stage, Winrock has partnered with Tanzanian communities, districts, water basin offices and the national government to build their capacity to plan, finance and deliver safe water services to over 720,000 people. The key to Winrock’s success has been coupling our expertise in water resource infrastructure with sustained, systems-level improvements to water access. Our approach builds partnerships and accountability between the multiple layers of water governance, from water users to communities to the national government. 

Sarai Jacobi of Nyakonge, Tanzania, right, by the new pump that brings water to her village.

Winrock has worked with and shaped strong community-based water supply organizations, water user associations, and basin water boards as key stakeholders to enact Tanzania’s Water Supply and Sanitation Acts (2009, 2019). These efforts began at the community level under the Integrated Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (iWASH) Program (2010-2016). In recent years they have been scaled up district-wide through partnerships with local government authorities, and later, the Rural Water and Sanitation Agency (RUWASA) under WARIDI (2016-present) and the basin level in the Mara Basin under the Sustainable Water Partnership (2016-present). 

Winrock’s work on the iWASH program used a multiple-use water services (MUS) approach to facilitate co-investment by communities in nearly 600 water points and wells. MUS is a consumer-oriented approach to water service delivery which takes into account people’s multiple domestic and productive water needs as the starting point for planning, financing and managing water services. The new water facilities lessened conflicts between farmers and pastoralists and reduced the distance to water sources by half for a majority of households. As a result, men and women could dedicate more time to livelihood activities.  

These improvements have made a major impact on the lives of beneficiaries, such as Lavina Venance. 

“I now have easy access to clean water less than 10 minutes away from my house,” Lavina said. “As a result, we now have as much water as we need, whenever we need it.” 

From the village level to the national stage, Winrock has partnered with Tanzanian communities, districts, water basin offices and the national government to build their capacity to plan, finance and deliver safe water services to over 720,000 people.

Like many others, Lavina has used this extra water to invest in a vegetable garden that not only feeds her family but also provides additional income. To ensure sustained community ownership and management of the new water infrastructure, iWASH facilitated the development of Water Point Management Groups and Community-Owned Water Supply Organizations (COWSOs). iWASH also invested in building a market for rope pumps, hand-drilling technologies, and WASH products. This experience working at the community level informed Winrock’s approach in subsequent activities, which scaled up training for COWSOs to manage water resources with guidance from the community’s water users. 

Winrock’s work in Tanzania addresses the next layer of water governance and strengthening community management structures by coupling institutional strengthening with construction and rehabilitation of water infrastructure. At the center of this approach are the COWSOs, which manage and operate water infrastructure. By coupling COWSO establishment and operational support with technical assistance and infrastructure development, Winrock’s work has enabled COWSOs to improve water service delivery, reliability and revenue collection for over 50 schemes. Under the new Water Act, these COWSOs are being clustered into Community-Based Water Supply Organizations (CBWSOs), and will be key to sustainably scaling water service delivery to many more Tanzanians.  To date, this activity has supported RUWASA to form 15 CBWSOs under the new Water Act. 

The key to Winrock’s success has been coupling our expertise in water resource infrastructure with sustained, systems-level improvements to water access.

Winrock has also engaged urban water supply and sanitation authorities (WSSA), particularly in Iringa. Winrock completed a rapid assessment of five WSSAs to develop a list of potential investment projects and, based on a number of selection criteria, four projects in peri-urban areas of Iringa were selected. Iringa Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Authority (IRUWASA) was actively engaged throughout the design and construction process and also invested heavily in the project, paying for trench digging, securing materials and extending distribution lines from the mainline improvements made by Winrock’s team. 

“Because of the project’s contributions, we are able to further our mission in bettering the lives of the communities through enhanced access to potable water,” said Iringa WSSA Managing Director Gilbert Kayange. “Your support has helped us to equally increase the water network system and customer base.” 

Tanzania’s nine regional Basin Water Boards (BWB) represent an additional key layer in water governance, serving as stewards of the crucial water resources that supply villages and towns with water for drinking and productive uses. Winrock is working with the Lake Victoria Basin Water Board under the Sustainable Water Partnership to develop its capacity to safeguard access to water for communities living in the Mara Basin and create a transboundary cooperation mechanism for water governance actors in Kenya and Tanzania that share the Mara Basin.  

Winrock further supports these actors with science-based decision-support tools designed with activity partner SEI, which have enabled Winrock to help Tanzania’s ministries develop the country’s first water allocation plan. “This water allocation plan is an important milestone in the process of forging a harmonized plan between Tanzania and Kenya to cooperatively manage this important resource,” said Lake Victoria Basin Commission Executive Secretary Dr. Ally-Said Matano. 

Winrock’s approaches to basin development have enabled the Lake Victoria Basin Water Board to prioritize investments in infrastructure development and water resource management and coordinate with local water users. Similar to our approaches with WSSAs, the Mara BWB can serve as a model for Tanzania’s other Basin Water Boards.

Winrock remains committed to scaling up water access for all Tanzanians by building strong water governance institutions at the community, district, basin and national levels. “The thing I am most proud of,” said Muganyizi Ndyamukama, Water Services Technical Lead for our current activities and formerly WASH Technical Lead of iWASH, “is that we are improving the lives of people.”

Poverty, lack of domestic employment and increased income opportunities outside the country have driven Nepali youth to foreign employment. For a few years the numbers of female migrants have been steadily rising, too. The age restrictions the government places on women who want to migrate to India and the Gulf states for domestic work means they are more likely to fall victim to smugglers and traffickers.

According to Nepal’s Department of Foreign Employment, more than four million Nepalis obtained work permits in the last decade. Remittances account for nearly one-quarter of the entire GDP of Nepal and was also what Nepalis relied on economically after the devastating earthquake of 2015 and the undeclared blockade imposed by India in the same year.

Nepali migrants are usually employed in the tourism, hospitality and construction sectors as well as at shopping malls. The global pandemic affects these sectors and businesses, resulting in migrant workers facing unemployment in several destination countries. Nepali workers are expecting support from their government because they have exhausted their savings during the lockdowns. Even more vulnerable are the workers who were trafficked or smuggled through unofficial channels and are staying illegally in the destination countries, unable to access help from either origin or destination countries. These, the most vulnerable and exploited among migrant workers, must be prioritized for rescue soon.

A good way to go about this is to coordinate with embassies to develop a list of migrant workers who need emergency support, rescuing those who are in the poorest condition, including those who need health and psychosocial support in addition to financial help. A list of workers with detailed information and addresses would make it easier to trace and provide health support.

All of these steps need preparatory groundwork. The official process of migration requires that workers obtain work permits and fly out of Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. However, some workers, especially female workers who are attempting to evade the age ban and the domestic work ban in several countries, are using road entries into India and then moving on to reach the destination country. Therefore, there is no accurate data about the actual numbers of workers who have migrated for work to these countries. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced many Nepali nationals to return home, has also provided us with an opportunity to collect information and improve data-collection mechanisms, processes and systems.

The Government of Nepal should be prepared for quarantine, health and employment generation before repatriating workers back to Nepal. Local and provincial governments have an opportunity to establish and/or improve the data-mechanism system related to foreign employment. It is very important to keep careful records of returned migrants and their families. These may help us to design employment and livelihood programs based on the skills of workers. Foreign employment-related government stakeholders should have coordination channels and should share data and other information among them when they design the program for returned migrants. Foreign employment helps Nepali society bring back different levels of skills. Respecting those skills may help to  plan and design community livelihood-related programs.

Will all workers be repatriated? Can local government generate employment opportunities in the current situation? Are local governments implementing agriculture-related livelihood programs to support returned migrants specifically? Do we have a market-management policy and a preparation and action plan to move forward regarding the livelihood-related programs?  If not, when will this happen? These are the questions the local and provincial governments need to look into and answer. All three levels of government must coordinate effectively to generate employment opportunities and suitable livelihood projects. If today the government is able to stand for returned migrants and support them effectively, we may not have to see the coming generations queuing up for permits to work abroad or taking desperate steps through unofficial migration channels to work in foreign countries, making themselves vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation.

Winrock International is helping restore Indonesia’s peatland in a way that will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, slow land subsidence, combat the threat of fire, and support the tens of thousands of people who live and work there. I recently returned from a trip to Indonesia, where obstacles — and opportunities — are both in full view.

Michael Netzer, GIS and Remote Sensing Carbon Analyst at Winrock International

A land of oil palm, acacia and peat

From a small rise in elevation the Kampar Peninsula spreads before us, dominated by row upon row of oil palm trees. Beyond the horizon stretch plantations of acacia trees, feeding one of the largest pulp and paper industries in the world. Decades ago, a vast wetland forest covered this land, located about 85 miles west of Singapore on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Known as peatland, the forest grows atop a thick layer of spongy peat moss, which formed over tens of thousands of years as organic matter accumulated without decomposing in the marshy, coastal conditions.

Today, the 700,000 remaining hectares of peatland in the Kampar are draped over the mineral soil as deep as 10 meters in many areas. These peatlands, however, are threatened by the expansion of the oil palm and acacia plantations that now cover over 70 percent of the landscape — the result of cheap available land, corporate and economic interests, large government incentives, and corruption that allowed large areas of land to be granted by local leaders to the highest bidder.

Oil palm and acacia threaten the natural peatland because these crops are not native to wetland environments and therefore require extensive ditching and draining of the peatland. When peatland is drained, the land shrinks and subsides — a process that threatens almost half of the current production land in the Kampar with collapse in the next 50 years. It also dries out the top few meters of peat, accelerates its decomposition, and releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Once these waterlogged soils dry out, they then become susceptible to fires that on dry years can become catastrophic.

The collapse of peatlands due to subsidence exacerbated by fires leaves only two options for Indonesia: restore the peatland through rewetting and finding alternative wetland tolerant production systems — or continue as usual until the collapse of both the ecosystem and the socioeconomic systems it supports.

Much of Indonesia’s peatland has been cleared to make way for oil palm and acacia plantations. Photo By Michael Netzer.

The situation is complex. The oil palm and acacia pulp and paper industries support the livelihoods of most of the smallholder farmers and constitute a large economy that the government relies on. Yet fire and land subsidence threaten these systems, and local and national governments are now keenly aware that alternatives to current peatland management need to be found. The question becomes, can these peatlands be rewetted and restored, and can the remaining wetland forest be protected without destroying the local economy? The answer to that question is critical to the future of Indonesia’s 14.9 million hectares of peatland, which accounts for a staggering 36 percent of the world’s tropical peatland. And that’s the question we have set out to investigate.

‘My Forest, My Breath’

As we drive east, we spot a plume of smoke from a fire. One of my local colleagues says it has been burning for a few days — a big fire for the wet season. After we move on, I overhear him calling the local authorities. Since the fires of 2015, the local government has initiated a number of programs to combat fire, including citizen alert systems like the one he is calling.

We’re going to a “Hutan Desa” (village forest), an area of forest that has been granted to the local villages as part of a government program meant to increase local authority of the land and foster better environmental stewardship. My motorbike guide puts on a dust mask that reads “Hutanku Napasku” or “My Forest, My Breath,” demonstrating the degree to which people in this region value forests.

Our motorbike guide dons a dust mask reading “Hutanku Napasku” or “My Forest, My Breath.” Photo By Michael Netzer.

On our way to the forest we pass a large, desolate clearing where an illegal oil palm plantation is in the initial stages of development. Where a wetland forest once stood there are now a series of large canals, still being dug by backhoe, and neat lines of oil palm seedlings planted among fallen logs. The wetland soil is now dry from draining.

This type of development is prohibited under Indonesian law passed after the fires of 2015. My guide explains that his village made a formal complaint to local authorities when they learned about the concession development, but the complaint clearly was not enough to stop it. These concessions only provide low-paying labor, he says, and his village is far more worried about the threat of fire. Despite changing policies and some encouraging national trends regarding peatland protection, this plantation is a stark reminder of how the push for development is always ready to continue its march forward.

However, oil palm is not the only culprit. Acacia trees that feed the massive pulp and paper mills to the south also drive land conversion and peatland forest loss. Acacia plantations account for over 70 percent of all the plantation land in the Kampar. These non-native trees grow quickly but require deep and well-organized drainage systems, which have caused some of the worst environmental impacts in the peninsula. Despite sustainability commitments from the pulp and paper industry, very little has been done, and around 35 percent of the acacia land is projected to collapse in the next 50 years.

There is an alternative to this plantation model. Fast-growing, wetland-tolerant trees species like mahang (Macaranga pruinosa) and geronggang (Cratoxylum arborescens) are economically viable and could replace acacia. The challenge is that even fast-growing wetland species grow at about half the rate of acacia, an unfortunate biophysical reality for the anaerobic nature of wetlands — and this modest loss in short-term profits is hard for the pulp and paper industry to accept even if it means long-term gains.

When I mention this perplexing lack of business forethought to local experts, most shrug in a resigned way. They remind me that in Indonesia the companies do not actually own the land, leasing it from the government instead for 50 to 100 years. By then, many of the leases will expire, and the companies will move on, leaving the cost and the damages to the local people and the government.

We reach the forest edge, park our bikes and begin to hack our way along an overgrown forest path. The forest canopy provides thankful refuge from the sun. Under a thick layer of leaflitter, the soil becomes spongy and our boots sometimes break through the top layer into the wet underneath.

We make our way into the peatland forest, which provides local communities with many sustainable products. Photo By Michael Netzer.

This forest does indeed provide the local communities with sustenance — or “breath.”  Our guide points out edible durian fruit growing from the canopy trees, and a type of guava called punak that provides a sweet and sour snack as we hike. We also munch on a small bitter leaf that apparently gives you energy while hiking. The forest also provides a number of economically valuable species, including sago palm (Metroxylon sagu), which produces large amounts of tasty starch that is commonly used in Southeast Asian noodles and breads; jelutong (Dyera costulata), a latex-producing tree that produces a high-quality food grade rubber; and nipa palm (Nypa fruticans), which produces light sugar that is not uncommon in Asian markets.

The canals and bits of open water in these remnant natural forests abound with small fish that provide a staple food source and small livelihood for local communities. Fishing was the traditional livelihood of the indigenous peoples of these peatlands. But as the natural forests peel away so do the fish, due to high water temperatures in the exposed canals and frequent fluctuations in water level. The sustenance opportunities supplied by the forest could be established without draining the peatland, all of which could help reestablish a more traditional, integrated and profitable lifestyle for the local people.

Seeking a solution to peatland forest degradation

Together with a number of local NGOS and the local government, Winrock has been developing demonstration plots and building capacity of the local community to re-wet the drained land and grow wetland-tolerant crops. Called paludiculture, these wetland cropping systems present a win-win approach for the region. However, there are challenges with paludiculture. Most local communities lack the resources to either adequately re-wet and restore the peatlands that have been drained, or to know what types of different crops or commodities could be grown on the re-wetted peat.

Winrock demonstration plots for paludiculture offer an alternative to the peatland degradation caused by oil palm and acacia plantations. Photo By Michael Netzer.

This is where Winrock comes in. Paludiculture allows for the restoration of the peatland, and in turn combats fire, land subsidence and greenhouse gas emissions while providing an economically viable alternative income for local people. In these small garden plots, annual crops like pineapple and chili pepper are being planted that can provide the local community with short-term profits. Intercropped with the annuals are longer-term perennials like sago and jelutong. Once mature, these crops have the potential to replace oil palm as the primary income for these local communities. And on the fringes of the demonstration plots grow mahang and geronggang trees. Not just an alternative to the pulp and paper industry, these trees can also serve as a wood-energy crop for markets in Japan and South Korea.

Based on Winrock’s research, these paludiculture perennial crops have the potential, if developed appropriately, to scale into large commodities generating higher profits per hectare than oil palm for the local community.

A truck rumbles through the cleared peatland. Photo By Michael Netzer.

As a reminder of the challenge before us, a procession of trucks loaded with acacia rumble by the demonstration plot. They’re heading to the nearby dock on the Siak River, where they will be loaded onto boats and transported to a local mill. In a sense the trucks symbolize one possible future for this area, one in which the peatland is doomed to collapse. These paludiculture cropping systems offer a different future, replacing business-as-usual with a sustainable, economically viable alternative that restores the ecosystem services that once protected this fragile peatland.