U Minnesota Study; IPCC Grossly Underestimating Emissions From Indonesia's Peat Deposits

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The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is drastically undercounting emissions from the draining of peatlands in Southeast Asia to make way for oil palm plantations, according to a new report. Researchers from the University of Minnesota's (UM) Institute on the Environment and from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), who published their findings in Environmental Research Letters earlier this month, say they set out to discover whether water table depth could be used as a proxy for measuring soil-carbon loss in plantations built on drained peat – a dense, marshy material that forms over thousands of years and holds immense carbon stores.

Peat forests cover about 250,000 square kilometers of Southeast Asia, an area roughly the size of Michigan, according to the report. Over the past 15 years, the authors write, peat forests have been increasingly cleared, drained and burned for new oil palm and pulpwood plantations. This exposes the upper peat layer to oxygen, which spurs decomposition and pumps carbon into the atmosphere, driving global warming. After the United States and China, Indonesia is the world's third-largest emitter, largely on account of its peatland conversion.

A previous study found that, though peatlands cover only about 2–3 percent of the Earth's land surface, they store about a quarter of the world's soil carbon – an amount roughly equal to the entire atmospheric load of carbon. In an effort to keep as much of that carbon in the ground as possible, many companies that buy commodities sourced from peat forests have committed to lowering their own carbon footprint by keeping the most problematic palm oil out of their supply chains.

Climatic changes caused by global warming are also causing peatlands to dry on their own, which leads to a “vicious circle” wherein burning of peatlands feeds climate change, which in turn fuels additional carbon loss as the peat dries.

EDIT

http://news.mongabay.com/2015/0715-gaworecki-ipcc-undercounting-peatland-emissions.html