The power of peatlands
The power of peatlands
10 May 2017
published by http://blog.cifor.org
Indonesia – Peatlands cover only 3 percent of the Earths land and yet they store about 20 percent of the worlds carbon (in regards to their soil and the plants that grow within their ecosystems). However, peat fires and increased draining of these lands for agricultural purposes like palm oil have led to massive amounts of carbon being released as carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.
One of the worst global environmental disasters occurred in Indonesia in 2015 when the daily CO2 emissions from Indonesias fires exceeded the daily emissions from the entire U.S. economy in the span of only 26 days.
Following this incident, everyone from experts and environmentalists to government officials agreed that the remaining peat forests needed to be protected.
But what about the peat lands that have already been degraded?
Scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and partner institutions are now examining how peatlands can be managed sustainably to produce bioenergy from woody crops that reduces, and even prevents, the emission of large amounts of carbon.
Growing palm oil requires drier soil, so people drain peat lands, but this has a huge impact on the degradation of peat lands because they rely on water to survive, says Dr. Nils Borchard, a researcher from Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany.
It is not easy to restore peat lands that have taken hundreds or thousands of years to evolve and it is not easy to manage ground water levels on such large landscapes because you need to know how the landscape interacts with local water systems, he says. But it is possible with good landscape and forestry management practices.
