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PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUJÁN AGUSTI
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By Robert Kunzig, Executive Editor, Environment
We could eliminate global aviation, both passenger and freight, and never fly anywhere again. Or we could protect the world’s peatlands, a huge and much abused store of carbon, and thereby make an even bigger impact on climate change. Which seems the more promising option?
For World Wetlands Day last week, my colleague Sarah Gibbens wrote an appreciation of peatlands, which are one kind of wetland—the kind where dead and undecomposed plant matter has accumulated for millennia to create a thick, dark, carbon-rich soil. Check out the lovely photos from National Geographic Explorer Luján Agusti of one of the world’s most remote peatlands, in Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina (pictured above).
We’ve come a long way since the days when the only good wetland was a drained one, but not far enough, which is why wetlands still need a day when we remember them. An additional third of them have been lost, Gibbens writes, in the half-century since a global treaty was adopted to protect them.
Peatlands cover only 3 percent of the Earth’s land area, but they pack a powerful carbon punch. The amount of carbon they’ve soaked up since the last Ice Age has been estimated at 600 gigatons—around two-thirds the amount in the atmosphere. And they are still soaking it up in many places. The world’s largest intact peatland was only recently discovered in the Congo rainforest. (Below left, peat from an Argentine bog; at right, freshly scooped peat.)
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