In Congo, a carbon sink like no other risks being carved up for oil
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Loading... - Fotso Siddi
- 24 Aug 2022
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The world’s largest bank of the partially decomposed plant matter known as peat in the tropics is even more extensive than initially thought, according to a new study.
The peatlands of the Congo Basin cover some 167,600 square kilometers (64,710 square miles) in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a team of scientists reported July 21 in the journal Nature Geosciences. The new maps confirm that the area, sometimes called the Cuvette Centrale, is about the size of England and Wales combined, which is 15% bigger than the estimates from the original mapping of the area.
“It’s a massive area. That’s for sure,” Bart Crezee, the study’s lead author and a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds in the U.K., told Mongabay.
Little was known about the location, size and carbon contents of these peatlands deep in the world’s second-largest rainforest before a team of scientists shared their maps based on satellite imagery and extensive on-site fieldwork in a 2017 paper in the journal Nature. Peat forms when the water that swamps the mix of soil and plant matter on the floor of this forest chokes off oxygen to bacteria and fungi, arresting the normal decomposition that would occur in a less soggy rainforest. As a result, much of the carbon in these bits of plants gets locked away in the ground instead of being emitted into the air. It turns out the Congo Basin’s peatlands hold a mind-boggling amount of carbon, on the order of the global emissions produced by burning fossil fuels in three years.
Those findings demonstrate that these peatlands are a powerful tool in combatting climate change: Left undisturbed, that carbon will remain locked away and out of the atmosphere where it could add to global warming — unless something shifts the balance or triggers the release of carbon. Widespread logging and industrial agriculture have levied a hefty toll on the peatlands of Southeast Asia. Cleared and drained to support crops such as oil palm, they’ve become a significant source of carbon emissions instead of a reliable storehouse.
Such disruptions could come from farming or timber extraction, or, from what appears to be the most pressing threat, exploration for oil from deep beneath the ecosystem. In April, the government of the DRC, which is home to two-thirds of the Congo’s peatlands, approved the auction of the rights to explore for oil in several blocks of land, including parts of the peatlands, raising serious concerns in the scientific and conservation communities about their future. Read More...
