26 Sep 2011: Report
The Big Payback from
Bringing Back Peat Bogs
The draining and burning of peat bogs is a major global source of CO2 emissions. Now, a pilot project in Russia — where wildfires burned vast areas of dried-out bogs last summer — is looking to re-flood and restore tens of thousands of acres to their natural state.
Wild fires that swept across Russia during the record heat wave last summer wrecked crops, triggered a global surge in wheat prices, caused pitch-black smogs that killed thousands of people and — though not much noted at the time — poured huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The gas came mainly from burning peat in wide areas of drained bogs around Moscow.
The world had seen nothing like it since peat bogs burned in Indonesia in 1998, shrouding neighboring countries in smoke for weeks. The Moscow fires were a stark reminder that peat bogs are the third greatest source of CO2 emissions — after burning fossil fuels and deforestation.
Now a global project is getting under way to stench the emissions by protecting the bogs. It will start later this year amid the dried-out tinderbox bogs around the Russian capital, with a project known as PeatRus.
Is the Cinderella CO2-source about to receive the attention it deserves? Drained and burned peat bogs release an estimate 2 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That is 5 percent of man-made emissions, behind fossil fuel burning (83 percent) and forest loss (12 percent).
PeatRus is the brainchild of Wetlands International, the Netherlands-based NGO. The project has financing from Germany and the political backing of the Russian government — an unusual event in a country where environmentalism is often a dirty word. The aim is to restore about 35,000
Bogs are natural stores of carbon, and many contain much more than the densest rainforest.hectares (86,486 acres) of dried-out peat bogs and stem CO2 emissions by re-flooding them. It should prevent up to a million tons of CO2 getting into the atmosphere by 2015, and much more thereafter.
The project in Russia forms part of a global plan to fight CO2 emissions from peat bogs revealed at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York last week. At that meeting, Wetlands International committed to “rewetting” one million hectares of peat bogs worldwide, enough to prevent the release of 100 million tons of CO2 in the next three years alone.
Peat is soggy and squishy. It is accumulated organic debris that has built up in waterlogged wetlands over thousands of years. These remains do not rot, because that requires oxygen and the bogs in which they sit contain no oxygen. So the bogs become ever larger natural stores of carbon. Many contain much more than the densest rainforest. But if the bog ever dries out, through drought or drainage, the carbon becomes vulnerable — both to fires, which directly release CO2 into the air, and to oxidation as the air penetrates. Either way, the accumulated carbon hemorrhages into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
Most of the fuel for the wild fires that choked Moscow last year was dried-out peat beneath farms created on former peat bogs that were drained in the 1960s. Burning peat caused 90 percent of the smoke, and the tiny particles contained in the peat smoke made it the most dangerous type of smoke too, when inhaled deep into the lungs of Muscovites.
The Russian peatlands restoration project, PeatRus, was agreed in the presence of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a meeting of the two governments in July this year in Hannover. It is funded by the German International Climate Initiative, which gets its money from selling carbon credits. The project’s architect is Wetlands International, which has already been doing pilot peat-land rewetting on 2,000 hectares of the Meschera national park east of Moscow in the province of Vladimir.
Russia is the second biggest emitter of CO2 from dried-out peat bogs. But the biggest emitter is Indonesia, which has a series of giant bogs, some more than 20 meters thick, across an estimated 20 million hectares of
Russia is the world’s second largest emitter of CO2 from dried-out peat bogs, after Indonesia.Sumatra, Borneo and New Guinea. Those bogs contain as much as 200 billion tons of CO2 — and are Wetlands International’s next target. In terms of carbon emissions, the draining of peat bogs is a far greater problem in Indonesia than deforestation; some 60 percent of the country’s overall CO2 emissions are bubbling up out of its bogs, as farmers and loggers drain them to plant palm oil or timber, or set fire to them as they clear the forests above.
The biggest known release of carbon dioxide from burning peat occurred during the huge forest fires that engulfed the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra in 1997 and 1998. This occurred when fires set by farmers to clear land got out of control during a drought created by a major El Nino event. Rather like last year’s Moscow fires, most of the smoke and CO2 came not from burning trees but from burning peat. Some bogs smoldered underground for several years.
Geographer Jack Rieley of the University of Nottingham in England later estimated that the peat fires in Borneo and Sumatra released between three and nine billion tons of CO2, equivalent to as much as a third of global emissions that year from burning fossil fuels. The fires were disastrous and highly visible, but the greater long-term threat is probably the slow but constant exodus of CO2 from the oxidation of dried-out bogs, as they are drained for cultivation.
I visited the scene of one peatland tragedy in 2007. On the Kampar peninsula of Sumatra, right across the Straits of Malacca from Singapore, is one of Southeast Asia’s largest peat bogs. Until 2002, the 4,000-square-kilometer mass of peat, some of it 15 meters thick, was largely untouched. The place could only be reached by boat. Some 50 Sumatran tigers lived there, along with clouded leopards, elephants, sun bears, tapirs and other rare species. A few tribal villagers took their fishing boats through its myriad waterways.
But then loggers arrived, intent on finding timber to feed two giant pulp mills nearby. Since then, Asia Pulp and Paper has been draining from the north, and Asia Pacific Resources International from the south and west. In 2007, I watched as the companies dug canals ever deeper into the domed
Targeting a relatively small number of boggy places around the world could have a big effect.swamp, with the dual aim of removing logs on trains of giant barges, and draining the swamp so they could later plant acacia trees on the logged land.
Asia Pacific’s peat scientist Jonathan Bathgate told me how the bog was bleeding to death before us. As his company’s drainage canals lowered water levels, the peat began to dry, the organic matter started to oxidise and carbon dioxide was released into the air. Emissions would continue until all the peat above the lowering water table was gone, he said.
The thick peat on Kampur contains anywhere between one and two billion tons of carbon. Its surface has already collapsed by more than a meter; if draining continues, it could lose an additional four meters within 25 years. Local officials of the environment group WWF says that, despite a moratorium on logging and draining promised by the Indonesian government, the carnage continues.
Some engineers are proposing big technical schemes to flood Indonesia’s degraded bogs. One proposal is to construct dams to restore part of a million-hectare drainage project undertaken by the Indonesian government back in the 1990s in a failed attempt to grow rice in central Borneo — the so-called Mega Rice Project. Julia Jaenicke of Germany’s Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich wants dams to flood 600 square kilometers of the failed farm, which would cut emissions of 1.5 million tons of CO2 a year.
Wetlands International prefers community-based schemes. Besides re-flooding projects, it plans to use micro-credit to encourage local development projects, such as fishing, that do not damage the bogs and may encourage locals to defend them.
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The potential global payback is huge. Stemming the annual 2 billion tons of CO2 emissions from the world’s bogs would cut the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in a century’s time by 25 parts per million (ppm) from business as usual. Many climate scientists want to curb emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation enough to keep CO2 concentrations, which are currently around 390 parts per million, from rising above 450 ppm. With the contribution of peat bogs, that figure could be cut to 425 ppm.
It is a prize worth having. The Moscow project could be just the beginning.
POSTED ON 26 Sep 2011 IN Biodiversity Climate Forests Pollution & Health Asia Europe
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ABOUT THE AUTHORFred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He serves as environmental consultant for New Scientist magazine and is the author of numerous books, including When The Rivers Run Dry and With Speed and Violence. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, Pearce has written about the environmental consequences of humankind’s addiction to chemical fertilizers and the possible role that airborne microbes play in our world, from spreading disease to possibly changing the climate.
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OF INTEREST
COMMENTS
Excellent report on Peat Bogs by Fred Pearce. You rightly emphasised the need to restore them.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com
It is not just in far-away places that restoration of wetlands can have beneficial effects.
Scottish Natural Heritage report that:
*"Peat soils in Scotland contain almost 25 times as much carbon as all other plantlife in the UK.
*Undisturbed peatlands store about 0.25 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year.
*If all Scotland's peatlands were undamaged they would stockpile the same as almost 40% of all the carbon produced by Scotland's households from electricity use."
See "Nature of Scotland" SNH, Spring 2009.
Wetland restoration (and land reform generally) is the 'low hanging fruit' of dealing with the problem of reducing the amount of CO2 that ends up in the atmosphere.
Yet very little is being done with respect to wetland restoration, and nothing at all as far as land reform is concerned. Vast areas of our uplands are devoted to sport shooting of various kinds that result in the land being either overgrazed by deer or burnt for grouse: two regimes that together minimise the carbon sequestration ability of the land.
Good report on an important topic. As said in the article, much emphasis has been placed on reducing deforestation as a way to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. Yet it is the water/soil interfaces that greatly control the amount of CO2 being released or stored in a natural environment. Restoring and protecting bogs, wetlands, and even river and stream riparian zones could contribute greatly to less CO2 in the atmosphere.
PIHDO, Dengue prevention Awareness Campaign
PIHDO, Panacea International Human Development Organization a non Governmental Organization, (NGO) in Islamabad, Pakistan has launched comprehensive dengue prevention Awareness Campaign Dengue is the most widespread mosquito-borne infection which in recent years has become a major international public health concern. The magnitude of dengue problem has increased dramatically and has extended fears of an outbreak especially within Punjab and throughout the Pakistan.
PIHDO, Panacea International Human Development Organization a non Governmental Organization, (NGO) in Islamabad, and is working for the promotion of health, education and environment protection in Pakistan within our scope to conduct dengue prevention awareness sessions to adopt better preventive measures to avoid becoming dengue virus carrier.
www.pihdo.com
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