Peat — ‘the big elephant in the room’
Posted on November 20th, 2009
Greenwire: Indonesia’s degraded peatlands have made the country the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, right after China and the United States.
When peat, formed over thousands of years from decomposed vegetation, dries and disintegrates, it leaks CO2 — and the stream fast becomes a torrential flow when burned.
In talks leading up to global climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month, “peat is the big elephant in the room,” said Agus Purnomo, head of Indonesia’s National Council on Climate Change. The problem is little discussed, and addressing how to stymie peat’s CO2 contributions would require larger talks about the economic impact of protecting the environment.
Loggers, palm oil plantations and state projects have chipped away at Indonesia’s forests — chock-full of peat — over the years. Farmers burn large swaths of forestland to create plots for farms — and release harmful CO2 in the process by burning the vegetation. Annually, the country loses forest area about the size of Connecticut.
Measuring the direct emissions from a deforested peatland is a complicated and not-yet-perfected science. Even when dry peat is not burning, it releases a steady stream of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere.
Three years ago, Indonesia’s peatlands released roughly 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to Wetlands International, a Dutch research and lobbying group. That’s equivalent to the combined emissions from Germany, Britain and Canada, and greater than U.S. emissions from road and air travel that same year.
The bad news is that there is no simple fix for the problem. The local economy is largely dependent on the jobs from palm plantations and other industries that require further destruction of the country’s forests (Andrew Higgins, Washington Post, Nov. 19). – DFM