Introduction

Peatlands offer a series of important ecosystem services including carbon storage, biomass production, and climate regulation. But climate change and rapid land use change are degrading peatlands, rapidly releasing stored C into the atmosphere.
During the 2015 El Nino season, Indonesian peatland fire generated a large emission of 0.9-1.5 Giga tonne of CO , which is equivalent to about 10% of mean annual global carbon (C) emissions from fossil fuels (Wiggins et al., 2018). The 2015 and 2018 fires are estimated to have burned about 1 million ha out of the 15-20 million ha peatlands in Indonesia. Once burnt, these areas are likely to burn again, leading to progressive land degradation and continuous release of C in the atmosphere. The fate of Indonesia’s peatlands is going to become more challenging in the near future as temperature is projected to increase and becomes drier.
Peatlands are not only a C store, but a record of our past environment. Peat preserves physical, chemical, and biological signatures of past environments and climates. Studies on high-latitude northern peatlands indicate that warmer climates induced an increase in plant productivity, which may lead to an increase in C sink. There is limited information on the age and rates of accumulation of tropical highland peat deposits. This information is crucial for modelling the global carbon cycle and also information can provide a clue on how past climate change affected the global C cycle.