yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Peatlands Critical In Climate Change Fight | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] Nice. Yeah, really. PC, my name is Brett Azhagi, and I'm a postdoctoral researcher.

We're here to study the peatlands; you compare it to other soils. Peat is really carbon dense; it's made up of partially decomposed plant material. All the carbon that the plant accumulates is life; it doesn't fully break down. So, that carbon stays in the ground unless you were to disturb that ecosystem. Then, that carbon will very likely be released into the atmosphere, and that will contribute to rising greenhouse gas levels and climate change.

Peatlands only cover 3 percent of the Earth's land surface, but they account for more than a third of the carbon stock. I mean, I think that what we have here in the Congo is the largest tropical peatland complex in the world. This morning, we're going to head off into the forest. We're hoping we'll actually reach the start of the peatlands.

Ok, previously we've produced our first estimate of how much carbon these peatlands store, and we're onto a kind of second phase where we're trying to improve our mock with the peatlands. We'll stay dry today; see if I can make it. I think there's almost no hope; it's happened; it's too late.

Nice. We know this is peat; it's organic plant material that starts at the stake. If it was not peat, it would be with a gray color. We're going to clog it up, and that gets taken back to the lab to work out the density and carbon concentration.

I'm really relieved. I wasn't actually sure if we would find peat underneath this. Around the world, peatlands are undergoing quite high levels of degradation and destruction for the sake of oil palm plantations and rice projects. My fear is that something is financially more lucrative than protecting the peatlands will mean that these peatlands will be sacrificed for that.

My hope, though, is that the data we produce will give the people the information they need to make better-informed decisions about how to manage the ecosystem systems. [Music]

More Articles

View All
A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place – Egoistic Altruism
Until recently, the vast majority of the world population worked on farms, and the total production of the world’s economy was mostly the total agricultural output. And this output was limited by the fixed size of the land. The total output of the economy…
Finding Something to Live and Die For | The Philosophy of Viktor Frankl
“The meaning of life is to give life meaning.” What keeps a human being going? The purest answer to this question is perhaps to be found in the worst of places. Austrian psychiatrist, philosopher, and author Viktor Frankl spent three years in four differe…
Divided government and gridlock in the United States | Khan Academy
We have this diagram here, party divisions of the United States Congress. What this helps us visualize is which parties controlled the various houses of Congress, as well as which party was in control of the White House. For example, during Lyndon Johnson…
Discretionary and mandatory outlays of the US federal government | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is talk about the broad categories of where the federal government gets its revenue and also the broad categories of where it spends its revenue. Now, when we talk about revenue for the federal government, that primari…
Meta's Moment of Truth (Facebook's Ad Problem Explained)
Mark Zuckerberg is dark in the door of Capitol Hill. Facebook is scrambling to contain the fallout; it’s facing a real threat to its cultural relevance. Do you think, in the wake of all these revelations, Facebook’s gonna make any changes? It is an extra…
Where No Grid Has Gone Before | Breakthrough
We don’t go to them and say, hey, we’ve got electricity. We’re going to bring it to you. We’re going to bring you modern entertainment that electricity provides, no. They’re coming to us and saying, we’re so far off the grid, we don’t have any electricity…