RI bushfires in 1997 blamed for massive carbon emissions

RI bushfires in 1997 blamed for massive carbon emissions

Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Leicester, England

Devastating fires running out of control in Indonesia significantly contributed to the biggest annual increase of carbon emissions into the atmosphere since records began, scientists say.

A report in the science journal, Nature, said that between 1997 and 1998 wildfires in Indonesia released into the atmosphere up to 2.6 million tons of carbon - mostly in the form of carbon dioxide.

The 1997 Indonesian fires spewed as much carbon into the atmosphere as the entire planet's biosphere removes from it in a year, the research showed.

Most of the carbon came not from burning trees, but from smoldering peat bogs that lost between 25 and 85 centimeters of their depth in the fires, Susan Page and her colleagues at the University of Leicester estimated.

In Borneo alone, burning spread across 8,000 square kilometers of swamp forest in Central Kalimantan, and probably consumed about 33 percent - 60,000 square kilometers - of Indonesia's peat bogs overall. The release contributed significantly to the largest annual increase in carbon emissions in a single year from 1997 to 1998 since records began, the authors concluded.

Their results are backed up by similar findings in an analysis of the effects of the wildfires on the composition of trace gases in the atmosphere.

That research was published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles by Ray Langenfelds, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Aspendale, Australia, and colleagues.

The two papers show that catastrophic events affecting small areas can evidently have a huge impact on the global carbon balance, according to an article by two other climate experts, David Schimel and David Baker at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in the United States.