From Brazzaville: “South-south” action on peatlands

The governments of the Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia have signed a declaration to protect peatlands because they are “natural treasures of great importance.”

The Brazzaville Declaration was released yesterday during the third meeting of the Global Peatlands Initiative partnership meeting being held in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo. The three countries, along with Peru, will participate in a planned global assessment of peatlands which is being discussed by project partners.

This assessment follows GRID-Arendal and UN Environment’s Rapid Response Assessment on peatlands, Smoke on Water, which was released last year. GRID-Arendal was at the meeting and will participate in the coming assessment. A French version of the report was released in Brazzaville.

Peatlands are found in 180 countries and are under threat everywhere from drainage for agriculture, fires and industrial development. Global peatland stocks hold billions of gigatonnes of carbon. Once drained, they dry out and emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Speakers repeatedly said in order to meet global climate change goals, this carbon needs to be kept where it is – wet and in the ground – in order to keep it from driving up global emission levels.

The meeting was attended by the Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo and ministers from all three countries and much of the discussion has focused on the importance of the recently mapped peatlands that lie in the Cuvette Centrale region of the Congo basin. At 360,000 square kilometres, the Congo basin is the second largest tropical wetland in the world. The two Congos share a border along the 4700 kilometre-long river.

The mapping effort took four years, according to Simon Lewis, a researcher from Leeds University in England who led the research team. The peat in this region contains 30 billion gigatonnes of carbon, he said, “equivalent to 20 years of the total emissions of the United States.”

The declaration focusses on the importance of the “peatlands found in the central Congolese basin, in an almost intact state.” They are important because of their “unique and exceptional biodiversity, their contribution to mitigation and adaptation to climate change through carbon storage, biodiversity conservation, [and] regulation of water regime and quality….”

The declaration commits the two Congos to cooperate on peatland preservation and to develop land use plans to “promote the conservation and protection of peatlands and prevent their drainage and degradation.” As part of this, they announced “the establishment of a transboundary collaboration agreement to preserve the future of these valuable natural peatlands and their ecosystem services, with the participation of communities and local stakeholders.”

The Brazzaville conference is called “Valoriser les tourbières pour la population et la planète” – Valuing Peatlands, for people and the planet.” There has been considerable discussion of the value of peatlands. Besides storing carbon, some of those values include ecosystem services — wildlife, water regulation, plants and other materials that the 75 million people need to live in the Cuvette Centrale region.

Indonesia’s Minister of Environment and Forestry, Siti Nurbaya, took part in the meeting and signed the declaration. Indonesia’s efforts to restore vast tracks to degraded peatlands – and the lessons and failures learned in this process – are part of a “South-South” exchange.

Indonesia has been a pioneer in peatland restoration, said Minister Nurbaya. “We have learned from what we have done, and what we should do better. When we go wrong, it costs us so much.” She added that Indonesia is establishing an International Peatlands Centre.

In a speech to the approximately 200 meeting participants, Congo’s Prime Minister, Clément Mouamba, spoke to the Indonesian minister directly: “We need your experience to succeed.”

Erik Solheim, UN Environment Executive Director, pointed to increasing understanding about the importance of peatlands. He said peatlands are important because they are unique ecosystems and they store huge amounts of carbon. When they are destroyed, such as through massive fires that struck Indonesia a couple of years ago, there are serious consequences for the health and livelihoods of people.

Solheim was positive in his assessment of the chances to protect peatlands: “Can we do it? For sure, yes we can!”