A special seminar, hosted by the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, will be held at 2 p.m. Sept. 23 in Keim Hall, Room 150. Fahmuddin Agus, a senior researcher with the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development, will present “Between a rock and a hard place: Carbon emissions and oil palm cultivation in peatlands.”
Refreshments will be served at 1:30 p.m.
Agus serves as the Indonesian representative on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. Indonesia is the largest palm oil-producing country in the world. At the same time, the country hosts some of the most biodiverse and carbon-rich ecosystems in the world, including tropical peatlands.
In this seminar, Agus will describe current status of oil palm cultivation in peatlands and discuss the role of crop intensification in mineral soils as a pathway to conciliate production goals with protection of fragile ecosystems, in the context of an ongoing project between the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and several Indonesian institutions.
Researchers at Nebraska led by Patricio Grassini, associate professor in agronomy and horticulture, are working together with researchers from the IAARD in the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture and other Indonesian institutions in a four-year project that aims to improve oil palm productivity on existing smallholder plantations in Indonesia. Grassini is hosting colleagues from the IAARD over the next two weeks at his lab.
“This project will benefit the economy while also preventing the loss of fragile landscapes such as forests and peatlands across the archipelago,” he said.
