Nature Magazine study says carbon release is larger than previously
thought
Millions of tonnes of carbon
stored in Indonesia's peat forests are being released into the atmosphere at an
alarming rate as deforestation, drainage and fire are converting it into a globally
significant source of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a study
published Thursday in the UK-based journal Nature.
Forestland covers roughly 60
percent of the country, making it the third largest area of tropical rainforest
in the world, according to the United Nations collaborative initiative on
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (UN-REDD), which
has a draft plan and a presidential decree by President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono in 2007, mandating that it slow emissions so but so far no progress
has been made.
Were REDD+ to be implemented in
Indonesia it would change the way natural resources are governed by creating a
standardized map, putting land titles, mining and forestry concessions on line
and forcing provincial governments to operate with transparent standards on
land use. At present the system is prone to such widespread abuse that it is
virtually impossible for anyone to know with any certainty the exact boundaries
of forests, including supposedly protected national forests
The Nature study is titled
"Deep instability of deforested tropical peatlands revealed by fluvial
organic carbon fluxes" (the full article is available by subscription
only). Bearing the names of six authors, it was published online in Thursday's
edition of the journal, making a mockery of continuing and widespread
pronouncements by the Indonesian government that it is seeking to halt
deforestation. Tropical peatlands, according to the study, contain one of the
largest pools of terrestrial organic carbon, amounting to about 89,000
teragrams (1 Tg is a billion kilograms). Some 65 percent of this carbon store
is in Indonesia, where it is being converted "into a globally significant
source of atmospheric carbon dioxide."
Carbon dioxide, released into the
atmosphere from forests and from the burning of fossil fuels in industrial
nations, is the single biggest source of greenhouse gases, which are expected
to raise the global mean temperature of the earth by at least 2 degrees C by
the end of this century. Many scientists expect the temperature to rise by as
much as 4C, which would cause catastrophic climate change, turning temperate
zones into deserts, causing wild weather phenomena such as endured by the
Philippines in December from Super Typhoon Bopha, which killed 1,146 people and
left 834 missing.
"We measured carbon losses
in channels draining intact and deforested peatlands, and found it is 50
percent higher from deforested swamps, compared to intact swamps," Sam
Moore, the lead author of the study and former Open University PhD student,
said in a press release.
"Dissolved organic carbon
released from intact swamps mainly comes from fresh plant material, but carbon
from the deforested swamps is much older - centuries to millennia - and comes
from deep within the peat column."
The researchers said that carbon
emissions from deforested peat swamps "may be larger than previously
thought."
"Carbon dating shows that
the additional carbon lost from deforested swamps comes from peat which had
been securely stored for thousands of years. Carbon lost from the drainage
systems of deforested and drained peatlands is often not considered in
ecosystem exchange carbon budgets, but the research team found it increased the
estimated total carbon loss by 22 percent," they said.
"Water falling as rain would
normally leave the ecosystem through transpiration in vegetation, but
deforestation forces it to leave through the peat, where it dissolves fossil
carbon on its way."
Vincent Gauci, the paper's corresponding
author and a senior lecturer in earth systems and ecosystem science at The Open
University, attributed the loss of stored carbon to increased agriculture,
especially for oil palms.
"Ancient carbon is being
dissolved out of Asian peatlands as they are increasingly turned over to
agriculture to meet global demands for food and biofuels," he said.
"This has led to a large increase in carbon loss from Southeast Asian rivers
draining peatland ecosystems - up by 32 percent over the last 20 years, which
is more than half the entire annual carbon loss from all European peatlands.
The destruction of the Asian peat swamps is a globally significant
environmental disaster, but unlike deforestation of the Amazon, few people know
that it is happening."
Another study published last
September in Nature Climate Change, a sister publication, said that In 2010
alone, land-clearing for Kalimantan oil palm plantations emitted more than 140
million tonnes of carbon dioxide – an amount equivalent to annual emissions
from about 28 million vehicles.
"Since 1990, development of
oil palm plantations has cleared about 16,000 square kilometers of Kalimantan's
primary and logged forested lands – an area about the size of Hawaii. This
accounts for 60 percent of Kalimantan's total forest cover loss in that time,
according to the study's authors.
"Despite contentious debate
over the types and uses of lands slated for oil palm plantations, the sector
has grown rapidly over the past 20 years," said project leader Lisa M.
Curran, a professor of ecological anthropology at Stanford and a senior fellow
at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. By combining field
measurements with analyses of high-resolution satellite images, the study
evaluated lands targeted for plantations and documented their carbon emissions
when converted to oil palm."
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