Asia peatland loss 'helps drive warming': scientists

Richard Ingham Yahoo News 4 Nov 09;

BARCELONA, Spain (AFP) – Scientists pointed the finger on Wednesday at Southeast Asian countries for draining wetlands for palm oil and cheap timber production, warning the practice was stoking dangerous global warming.

In a presentation on the sidelines of the UN climate talks, a network of scientists branded Southeast Asia the world leader in greenhouse gases that seep from degraded peat soils.

Peatlands comprise compacted carbon from vegetation, deposited over thousands of years.

The carbon is safely stored when the soil is covered with water, but starts to be released as a greenhouse gas when the land is exposed to air, explained Hans Joosten of Germany's Greifswald University, who coordinated the study.

"They become very big sources of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide," Joosten said.

"The main hotspot is Southeast Asia, with a lot (of emissions) from deforestation and fire and from palm oil and pulpwood plantations," he told a press conference.

Globally, 1.3 billion tonnes of CO2 were emitted from drained peatlands in 2008, compared with 1.06 billion tonnes in 1990, Joosten told a press conference.

This figure comprises only biological degradation of peatlands and does not include peatland burning, which by some estimates could add at least two billion tonnes of CO2 per year, according to the report.

To give a comparison, total greenhouse-gas emissions in 2004 were the equivalent of around 49 billion tonnes of CO2, according to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Of the 1.3 billion tonnes in emissions from peatlands last year, 580 million tonnes came from Southeast Asia, led by Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

The region's emissions from this source have increased by 250 percent since 1990 and now account for 70 percent of the regional pollution from oil, gas and coal -- the "fossil fuels" that are most notoriously to blame for man-made climate change.

China, too, is a major source of peatland warming, ranked third in the world after Indonesia and Russia.

The study is the first inventory of global peatlands, said Susanna Tol of Wetlands International, which commissioned the probe.

It was released as negotiators wrangled over a draft text that will be put to the December 7-18 UN climate talks in Copenhagen. Its goal is a treaty that will reduce man-made carbon emissions and help poor countries in the firing line of climate change.

Tol said peatlands had been badly overlooked in international talks, where a more favoured focus has been on preventing carbon emissions by preserving forests and curbing deforestation.

But peatlands store three times the amount of carbon in all the world's forests, which makes it imperative to conserve them, she said.

Joosten said peatlands were found in 175 countries. They account for only three percent of the world's land area, but store a massive 550 billion tonnes of carbon because they are so compact, with some layers being up to 20 metres (65 feet) thick.

So long as drained peatlands are exposed to air, the carbon is released, which means that the sole option is to "re-wet" them by returning them to bog or marsh, he said.

Numerous small-scale projects are underway in various countries to "re-wet" peatland that has been drained and abandoned, some of which entails planting reeds or trees that can then be harvested.

"It entails making a change from dry agriculture to wet agriculture," said Joosten, adding though that the cost of restoration was hard to estimate.

"It is very strongly dependent on the local situation."

Study Finds Vital Peatlands Neglected
Gerard Wynn, Reuters 5 Nov 09;

BARCELONA - Draining and burning of the world's peat bogs accounts for about 5.5 percent of global carbon emissions but are currently excluded from governments' climate targets and U.N. talks, a study found on Wednesday.

Peat stores around twice as much carbon as all the world's trees, but compared with the well-publicized issues of fossil fuels and forests, the sector was the "Cinderella" of climate change policies, said Hans Joosten at Germany's Greifswald University, co-author of the report.

"We call for mandatory accounting of emissions from peatlands," said Susanna Tol of the environment group Wetlands International, presenting the findings on the sidelines of November 2-6 U.N. climate talks in Barcelona. Reporting was only voluntary now, she said.

"So far these emissions have not been addressed" in U.N. talks meant to agree a global climate deal in Copenhagen in December, Tol added. The 175-nation meeting in Barcelona is the final session of preparatory talks before Copenhagen.

Layers of peat up to 20 meters (about 65 ft) thick accumulate as plants rot in wetland areas. As the vegetation is water-logged, it doesn't decay and release the stored carbon dioxide into the air, a major cause of global warming.

But landowners and farmers are draining peatlands, notably in South East Asia, to plant oil palm plantations to meet rapidly growing demand from the food and biofuel industries.

Tol said peatland emissions must be included in far higher profile U.N. talks to design a framework for cutting emissions from the destruction of rainforests, often in peatland areas. The study echoed the findings of an article published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Geoscience, which found that draining peatland in South East Asia alone produced carbon emissions equal to a quarter of those from global deforestation.

That study put CO2 emissions from deforestation at 12 percent of the global total, not 20 percent as widely thought.

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Curbing carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels has received the lion's share of governments' climate change attention so far, for example under cap and trade schemes to penalize industry or steps to promote renewable energy.

A palm oil boom in Indonesia has meant that in 2008 its carbon emissions from peat were one and a half times greater than burning fossil fuels, Wednesday's study said. The country is the top peatland emitter, followed by Russia and China.

The study estimated that last year global carbon dioxide emissions from draining and burning peat amounted to 2 billion tonnes annually, or about 5.5 percent of the global total. Since 1990 those emissions have grown by 25 percent.

Continued draining or burning of peat is not an option, given that it stores about 446 billion tonnes of carbon, or twice as much as the world's forests, Greifswald University's Joosten said.

The world could limit peatland emissions both by limiting deforestation and peat drainage, and boosting wet farmland, for example harvesting of mosses, he added.

(Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)