Peat? Peat who?

Why peat could be the new 'black gold'
GILLIAN MURDOCH IN PALANGAKARAYA, INDONESIA
SCIENCE has long known that Indonesia's 20 million hectares of dense, black tropical peat swamps, formed when trees, roots and leaves rot, are natural carbon stores.
Now investors around the world are dreaming of the billions they could rake in as the world battles global warming. Peat bogs are the new black gold, some say.
"They are 50 to 60 per cent carbon. Peat stores more carbon than all of the planet's vegetation combined," Professor Jack Rieley, a peat expert from the University of Nottingham, said.
Marcel Silvius, of Wetlands International, a non-governmental organisation, said peat was a potential gold-mine.
He was the co-author of a report that found Indonesia's peatlands emitted two billion tonnes of each year - more than the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Japan or Germany.
Years of lucrative deforestation of timber and palm oil plantations has entrenched the practice of burning vast areas of Indonesian land, smothering neighbouring Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei in annual choking smoke clouds.
It has also threatened many rare species such as Indonesia's iconic animal, the orang-utan.
Now, in a sudden reversal, keeping Indonesia's forest cover intact is a hot investment ticket in a warming world, according to Mr Silvius.
He said the world's peatlands were responsible for 8 per cent of global emissions, equal to the cuts needed by all the industrialised nations under the Kyoto Protocol. Tens of billions could be invested to achieve this, Mr Silvius said.
About £15 billion of carbon credits - representing 1.6 billion tonnes of - were bought and sold in Europe last year by firms seeking to trade off business- related carbon emissions for reductions achieved elsewhere.
Already, investors are knocking on doors in towns close to peat swamps, such as Palangkaraya, in Central Kalimantan.
Emissions cuts from forest areas such as peatlands are not yet eligible for trade, because they were excluded from the Kyoto Protocol's first, 2008-12, round. But many predict they will be in six months, after the UN climate meeting in Bali hears a report on reduced emissions from deforestation.
"It has to enter the agenda so that developing nations such as Indonesia can benefit," Rachmat Witoelar, the environment minister, said. "We are ready. We have a grand plan to identify and restore or conserve our forest areas. We have also prepared the financial side of the deal."
Meanwhile, investors are hoping carbon futures will evolve into tradable credits.
As home to 60 per cent of the world's threatened tropical peatlands, and among the world's top three carbon emitters when peat emissions are added in, Indonesia is in the spotlight.
However, speculators descending on Indonesia's peat-towns are finding locals confused by the intricacies of carbon trading, according to Daniel Murdiyarso, of the Centre for International Forestry Research.
"It's not easily understood by people. The papers here say, 'Central Kalimantan is clearing up the air of Canada'," he said.
• THE report on reduced emissions from deforestation will be presented at a UN climate change meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007.
Deforestation, especially in the tropics, contributes about 20 per cent of man-made global carbon emissions, some two billion tonnes of carbon per year. Trees are 50 per cent carbon and release carbon dioxide () when they rot or burn. Forests soak up vast amounts of and clearing the land erodes soils that are also carbon stores.
Forests contribute more to the global emissions tally than the entire transport sector (14 per cent), but they are not included under the existing emissions reduction framework, the Kyoto Protocol, which focuses on industrial and transport-related emissions.
The influential Stern climate change report - by the former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern - suggested that preventing emissions from deforestation would be cheaper than some other methods of emission reduction.