Discovery and Protection of the World's Largest Tropical Peatland

A team of three scientists and five assistants found 33 billion tons of carbon locked up in a Congo ecosystem – the equivalent of 20 years of current US fossil fuel emissions. The discovery is a key step in ensuring this carbon-storing area is protected.

Astonishingly, 145,500 square kilometers (56,200 square miles) of peatland – an area larger than England – went undetected on our crowded planet until now. We found 30 billion metric tons (33 billion tons) of carbon stored in this new ecosystem that nobody knew existed. That’s equivalent to 20 years of current US fossil fuel emissions. You can read the important science in Nature. Here we describe how we did it, and our struggles against sabotage, arrest, and losing our own minds.

Peat is usually associated with cold places, not the middle of the hot, humid, Congo Basin. It’s an organic wetland soil made of partially-decomposed plant debris. In waterlogged places those plants can’t entirely decompose, and are not respired as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The peat thus builds up slowly, locking up ever-more carbon. The amounts involved are huge: peat covers just 3% of Earth’s land surface, but stores one-third of soil carbon.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2017/0206/How-we-discovered-the-world-s-largest-tropical-peatland-deep-in-Congo

Daniel Murdiyarso/CIFOR

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