Restoration

By Deanna Ramsay. Originally posted on Forests News. Indonesia – Tropical peatlands are massive carbon sinks. But what happens when they are depleted of the water that sustains them, or subject to other land-use changes? After fires raged in 2015 over Sumatra and Kalimantan in Indonesia, in part due to the widespread draining of peatlands, […]

By Susan Onyango, originally posted on ICRAF’s Agrofrestry World. Land degradation impacts the health and livelihoods of about 1.5 billion people worldwide. Further, the annual costs associated with land degradation worldwide is estimated to be US$ 231 billion as measured in terms of loss productivity and the costs to due to loss of ecosystems services. Given […]

By Rose Poley. Originally posted on Forests News. What do a hairy-nosed otter, a Sumatran tiger and a white-backed Malayan Tapir have in common? Not only are they some of the rarest animals on planet earth, they spend most of their days snuffling through peatlands. “Conversations about protecting peatlands tend to focus on the carbon […]

By Tim Christophersen, originally posted at the UN-REDD Programme The lack of knowledge on peatlands must be addressed urgently. An often neglected ecosystem, and significant contributor to climate change, is peat. When it burns or dries up huge amounts of CO2 are released. The UK Met Office says carbon dioxide levels have seen a surge in recent months as […]

By Fred Pearce, Originally posted on the CGIAR’s Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems’ Thrive blog What do you do with a radioactive landscape? Leaving aside the devastation left in the Marshall Islands, eastern Kazakhstan and elsewhere by atmospheric bomb tests in the 1950s, the prime cases today are the exclusion zones created around Chernobyl in 1986 […]

Originally posted at the UN-REDD Programme Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo announced the other week a landmark moratorium banning all peat-damaging activities. At the Climate COP in Marrakech a new UN Environment-led global initiative, the Global Peatlands Initiative, was launched. Why that sudden focus on protecting peatlands, an ecosystem so far not on the radar of […]