Study finds vital peatlands neglected

By Gerard Wynn BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) – 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. … 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. …