PALANGAKARAYA (Indonesia): It used to be malaria that gave people fevers in Indonesia’s remote, mosquito-infested peatlands.

Now it is carbon.

Investors around the world are dreaming of the billions the festering carbon-rich bogs could bring in as the world battles global warming. Peat bogs are the new black gold, some say.

Science has long known that Indonesia’s 50 million acres of dense, black tropical peat swamps, formed when trees, roots and leaves rot, are natural carbon stores, explained University of Nottingham peat expert Professor Jack Rieley.

“They are 50 to 60 per cent carbon. Peat stores more carbon than all of the planet’s vegetation combined,” he said.

Now the dots have been joined between peatlands and the massive amounts of climate change-related carbon emissions they release when burnt or drained to plant crops such as palm oil.

Peat is a potential gold-mine, said Marcel Silvius, Senior Programme Manager of Wetlands International NGO.

“This science was not available before,” said Silvius, the co-author of a November 2006 report that found Indonesia’s peatlands emit two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year — more than the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Japan or Germany.

Years of lucrative deforestation for 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, known as haze.

Now, in a sudden reversal, keeping Indonesia’s forest cover intact is a hot investment ticket in a warming world, said Silvius.

“(The world’s peatlands) emit eight per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, equal to what all the Annex One (industrialised) countries need to decrease (under the Kyoto Protocol). Tens of billions could be invested to achieve this,” said Silvius.

Around $30.4 billion of carbon credits — representing 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide — were bought and sold last year in Europe by companies seeking to trade off business-related carbon emissions for emissions reductions achieved elsewhere.

Already, investors are knocking on doors in towns close to peat swamps, such as Palangkaraya, in Central Kalimantan.

But stitching up peat swamp carbon deals without involving local communities risks raising real tensions, said Jutta Kill of FERN, the Forests and the European Union Resource Network.

Whatever eventuates, if perennial peat land problems such as poverty and fires aren’t tackled, Indonesia’s forests could go up in smoke, taking carbon traders dreams with them, Rieley said.—Reuters