Carbon Releases in Asia

ninthwave writes "After previous discussions on global warning, I thought I would post some interesting research in the affects of forest fires and drought in Asia on carbon output. The Guardian has this article. More detailed information can be found in these articles from Leicester University and the BBC"

Comments

The reverse is also true

[NutMan]

You can offset the increase in CO2 production by planting woody plants for agriculture rather than annual grains. Check out these articles by Phil Rutter of Badgersett Research Farms:

Reducing Greenhouse CO2 Through Shifting Staples Production To Woody Plants

Woody Agriculture: Increased Carbon Fixation and Co-Production Of Food and Fuel

Re:Responsibility? It's people.

[Bob Violence]

To amplify on the previous poster's comments a bit--the fires were started by humans, both to clear land for small farmers (traditional slash-and-burn agriculture) and to clear land for large-scale plantation farming (mostly for the production of palm oil). It sounds like the larger commercial operations are mostly responsible for setting the fires.

That season (1997/1998), the fires spread because the forests were unusually dry. This was partly because it was an El Niño year, which caused severe drought.

But human activity was probably a more important factor--in the mid '90s large drainage canals were cut in the peat forests (as part of the Mega Rice Project), which dried out large areas of peat; and large areas of the forest have been damaged by other activities, especially logging. So the fires spread along the banks of the drainage canals (see this article from the Guardian), along logging roads, and in general, areas where humans had damaged the forest--pristine areas were far less affected by the fire, even when they did burn. (See Satellite shows how logging makes forest more flammable, which is based on an article in the Nov 22 2001 issue of Nature.)

So, yeah, I'd blame humans for this fire--they started the fires, human use of the forest made the fires both larger and more damaging than they would have been otherwise. El Niño was a huge factor in the spread of the fires, but humans made it way worse.

While the carbon released by the fires is something to worry about, these fires also caused a big loss of biodiversity. Borneo is one of the few places where orangutans are found in the wild, along with other endangered primates. The fires are thought to have killed thousands of orangutans and destroyed much of their habitat. This wouldn't be such a huge problem--forest can grow back, after all--except that Borneo is being heavily deforested, because of (largely illegal) logging, conversion to farmland, and so on. At current rates of deforestation, some think that Borneo's forest might be essentially gone in two decades, driving orangutans, proboscis monkeys, and other species to extinction.

Incidently, since these fires were burning in peat, some of them never really stopped--the peat has just been smoldering for years. It's an El Niño year right now (much weaker than '97/98), and there are fires on Borneo again (or at least there were, as of August--it's hard to find current information, though you can look at the Global Fire Monitoring Center's webpage for southeast Asia). Another chance to take measurements of carbon emissions, I guess.