You’ve heard of the Amazon rainforest, but have you heard of its neighbor, the cerrado? It’s a vast savanna — the most biodiverse in the world — of swaying grasses punctuated by trees. But its most remarkable feature, and its climate superpower, is hidden underground within its wetlands: concentrated carbon known as peat.
New research suggests that the cerrado is storing far more carbon than anyone realized — six times more, per hectare, than the Amazon’s biomass, with its dense tangle of trees. But like Brazil’s famous rainforest, the cerrado is in serious trouble, due to climate change and the encroachment of agribusiness. Protecting these peaty ecosystems, then, would be a major win not just for preserving biodiversity, but for keeping planet-warming gases out of the sky. “When you degrade it — one hectare of Amazon and one hectare of wetland in the cerrado — we are losing six times more carbon,” said ecologist Larissa Verona, lead author of a new paper describing the work. (Verona did the research while at the State University of Campinas, but is now at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.)<... Read more
