The Current: Understanding peat and its role in fighting climate change
CBC Radio’s The Current with Matt Galloway recently hosted science and environment writer Edward Struzik (Fellow at the Queen’s University Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy). Edward tackles the world of peatlands in his new book, Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs and the Improbable World of Peat. He talks about how humans have misunderstood peatlands for decades and why we’re paying the price for it now.
Click here to listen to the interview.
“Peat is just a medium for so many different valuable things. It represents only 3% of the Earth’s landscape, but it stores twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests [...] It can mitigate floods, it can stop or slow a wildfire.”
”[Peat] stores a tremendous amount of carbon. If we lost all our peatlands we would accelerate climate change very very dramatically. And we’re seeing that to some extent in places like the Liard Valley in the Northwest Territories, Bonanza Creek in Alaska and many places in Siberia where the permafrost is melting.”
Edward also wrote a recent article in the Queen’s Gazette touching on these same topics: