The Congo: For The Sake Of Us

CONGO

For the Sake of Us

Start a discussion about ecosystems that are vital to the Earth’s survival and folks will undoubtedly mention the Amazon, polar glaciers, the Great Barrier Reef and the African savannahs where elephants and other animals roam.

But scientists recently discovered a 56,000-square-mile wilderness that they say could be vital to containing the greenhouse gases causing climate change: the peatlands along the Congo River.

Peat is decayed vegetation and other organic matter that has settled in watery bogs. As the Washington Post reported, researchers previously thought peat mostly existed in cold, northern environments like the British Isles and Canada. It seems it also can be found in Central Africa.

That’s good news insofar as peatlands make up only 3 percent of the planet’s land area but store as much as all the carbon found in living plants and animals.

But it’s also bad news because the desperately poor people living along the Congo River are cutting down the trees that make the peatlands possible at rate of around 2.4 million acres a year.

“They [peatlands] can release an enormous amount of carbon and contribute to climate change,” British scientist Simon Lewis told the Post. “They are really a pivotal part of the global question about how we manage ecosystems in the future to reduce our emissions to zero.”

The people along the Congo aren’t the only ones chopping down trees.

A new initiative that uses satellite images to record real-time deforestation found that people burned down around 60,000 soccer fields’ worth of trees since October this year, likely to clear land for agriculture, Reuters reported.

Corporations that produce palm oil, a popular ingredient in numerous food products, are making little or no progress on a 2014 pledge to reduce deforestation while draining peatlands in Indonesia and Malaysia to grow plants for the oil, the Independent said.

The knock-on effects are surprising. In Australia, for example, deforestation is causing runoff into the Great Barrier Reef, where water quality is already causing an unprecedented die-off of the creatures in the undersea ecosystem, wrote the Guardian.

Some people are acting.

American, European and Japanese companies are scrutinizing or halting wood imports from countries like Papua New Guinea where illegal logging is scarring the land, the Financial Times reported.

The Irish Times noted that Ireland’s climate change watchdog has also called on the country to cut down on its use of peat because the dirty fuel is hampering the Emerald Isle’s climate change goals.

But, put into context, those efforts are like fighting tides that are slowly but inexorably rising.