The world has a real fight on its hands

Our planet will never cease to surprise us. Scientists have now found that warming temperatures can transform small natural ponds from absorbers of one type of greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide) into emitters of another (methane). The discovery may appear trivial, because small ponds cover only a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface. But consider the fact that ponds emit about 40 percent of the methane from inland water bodies.

The results of the seven-year study by British scientists have been published in the Nature Climate Change journal, and the researchers say both the trends cited in the study increased as global temperatures rise. That methane is about 28 times more effective in trapping the sun's radiation than CO2 makes the phenomenon especially devastating.

Five weeks before the scientists published the research results came a heartening, yet alarming, news - heartening because the British and the Congolese have discovered the largest tropical peatland (the size of England) that straddles the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo, and alarming because draining it will release 30 billion metric tons of CO2, equivalent to greenhouse gases emitted by the United States in 20 years.

Peat does not decompose when it is waterlogged, but when it dries out, those organisms that break down plant materials revive and the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere. Peatlands are formed from dead plant materials and act as "carbon sinks", and can fight climate change only when they are left intact.

The problem is that, although the thickly forested and swampy terrain of the two Congos has kept development to a minimum, similar peatlands in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia for example, have been threatened by agriculture - especially palm oil plantations.

Four months before the discovery of the peatland, another group of researchers said we had lost 10 percent of a most valuable part of our world in the past two decades.

In other words, unspoiled land twice the size of Alaska was lost to agriculture, logging and mining in the past two decades, with the worst-hit regions being South America (which lost 30 percent of its wilderness) and Africa (14 percent).

This loss has shocking implications for biodiversity and for climate change, said James Watson of the University of Queensland, Australia, and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, who led the research team.

"We are running out of time and we are running out of space (to save the planet)," Watson said. "If society asked the question 'What does nature need?', these places would become a global priority for environmental action."

But environmental action has never been a global priority for our growth- and profit-hungry world. The aggressive anti-climate change campaign of countries such as China notwithstanding, global environmental action has always been shortcoming, not least because of people such as the newly appointed chief of the US Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt, who critics describe as a vehement climate change denier. And it's the Pruitts of this world that should inspire the world to intensify the fight against climate change.

Contact the writer at oprana@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 02/28/2017 page2)