Science - At Current Loss Rates, SE Asian Peat Forests Gone By 2030, Billions Tons More C Released

Southeast Asia boasts nearly 250,000 square kilometers of peat swamp forests, which host creatures such as orangutans and the world's smallest fish, and store vast quantities of carbon. But these peat swamps are in trouble, according to a new study of deforestation in the region. If people continue to chop, drain, and burn at current rates, researchers report, by 2030 no native swamps will remain and billions of metric tons of carbon will be lofted into the atmosphere.

Almost all peatland in Southeast Asia is found in peninsular Malaysia and an archipelago of islands that includes Borneo and Sumatra. Rain trickles down mountains and through forests there, ultimately ending up in low-laying lands that can't quickly drain. Plant matter can't fully decay and turns into a peaty, acidic stew, trapping carbon and forming a unique environment for wildlife. Although Southeast Asian swamps comprise between 6% and 7% of global peatland, they store roughly 64 billion metric tons of carbon—about nine times the global emissions from fossil fuel combustion in 2006.

Globalization eventually reached Southeast Asia in the 1980s, driving farmers to fell peat forest trees for cash and replace the swamps with palm oil plantations. Earth-monitoring satellites have visually documented such destruction for decades, but researchers had never precisely quantified the loss for the region over a long period of time. Sorting out which pixels in the images belonged to swamps, palm oil plantations, urban areas, and the like is also difficult work that's impossible without well-tuned algorithms. So for 5 years, lead author and ecologist Jukka Miettinen and his colleagues at the National University of Singapore studied maps and developed methods to codify the images. They also incorporated infrared images to gauge the effect of human-set fires in the region.

The results, published online 15 April in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, show that peatland forest dropped from 77% of original coverage to 36% between 1990 and 2010. At current rates, no forest will remain in 2 decades. "Even though I have been working in this region for nearly ten years and was well aware of the deforestation taking place in Southeast Asian peatlands, I must say that I was still surprised to see how little peat swamp forest is left," Miettinen writes in an e-mail.

EDIT

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/04/tropical-peat-forests-in-trouble.html

:thumbsup:

you would think that this would be a concern for the rich and poor alike . i guess those who don`t care figure they can breathe methane

x(

We are doing exactly the right things -- if destroying the human race is our goal.