Me and the Peat - The researcher and the research
My name is S hona Jenkins and I hail from Canada, but currently live in Bonnie Scotland's capital city, Edinburgh. I am a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and I study people and peat in the central Congo Basin peatlands. Amazingly, this peatland wasn't on the map until 2017 when a team of European and Congolese researchers traveled to a remote area of the Congo Basin to trek through a swampy forest in search of peat. And boy did they find peat! The central Congo Basin peatlands are now recognised as the world's largest tropical peatland. Neat.
Ri ght now you may be asking yourself what exactly is peat? Here's my peat 'in a nutshell' explanation:
In very simple terms, peat is semi-decomposed plant and tree material that has been stuck in a slow pace of decomposition because peat forms in areas of the world that are water-logged. When organic material decomposes in water, it happens very slowly due to the lack of oxygen, hence the reason why it takes 10,000-50,000 years for peat to accumulate in the tropics.
Now you're probably asking yourself why should you care about a tropical peatland in a remote area of Central Africa? I can think of many reasons, but I will boil it down to my top 3 reasons. Here it goes:
#1 The central Congo Basin peatlands are globally important due to the phenomenal amount of carbon that is stored in the peat. Right now, you can find the carbon equivalent of 20 years worth of fossil fuel emissions from the United States stored in the peat in the central Congo Basin!
But the central Congo Basin peatlands may become degraded as a result infrastructure development, oil and gas exploration and exploitation, logging, development of palm oil plantations, to name a few threats. This would in all likelihood degrade the peat. When peat is degraded, the carbon stored in the peat gets released to the atmosphere. Boom! That could cause a carbon bomb and exacerbate the global impacts of climate change. Ideally, the world would be better off if this didn't happen.
However, it's not science's place to overstep and tell any sovereign state how they should manage their forest resources. Let's also not forget that many industrialised countries have a poor track-record of massively deforesting their land in the name of development. Science can, however, provide evidence to support local stakeholders in Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa who are actively developing policy responses that will determine the future management and conservation of this globally important peatland ecosystem.
#2 We don't even know what we don't know about the central Congo Basin peatlands because they are largely unexplored in scientific literature. How did they form in the past? How have the peatlands changed over time? What might happen to them in the future? These questions are being explored by a group of European and Congolese researchers and civil society groups in the CongoPeat project, which is the umbrella of research that my research project sits under.
Though we have a lot more questions than answers, we do know that the central Congo Basin peatlands are facing threats (see point #1) and climate change stands to impact the peatland ecosystem. Climate change may affect rainfall patterns and amounts and temperatures in central Africa, which ultimately may cause the peat to dry up and degrade...and we now all know what happens when peat degrades. Bye, bye peat carbon. Hello, atmospheric carbon emissions.
#3 We know that forests play a significant role in supporting the livelihoods of millions of rural Congolese, but we know almost nothing about the role that peatland forest resources play in supporting rural livelihoods in the central Congo Basin. Why does that matter? Simply, if a future exists where the peatlands are sustainably used and largely protected and rural Congolese people can reach for opportunities to improve their livelihoods, then we must understand the dynamic between people and peat. To focus solely on understanding the natural science of the peatlands, when management of the ecosystem is done by people and has material consequences for people will likely lead us down a path where we have been before. We have seen what happens when conservation and natural resource management decisions disregard social science - it leads to unjust outcomes for local people who have little power to object to decisions that affect their lives.
I hope I have you hooked on following the research looking into the central Congo Basin peatlands. Over the coming weeks and months, I am going to be posting blog posts that showcase different aspects of my PhD project. I will be conducting the first comprehensive assessment of the human uses of the central Congo Basin peatlands. To do this, I have designed an interdisciplinary study. The first arm of the study uses remotely sensed data to detect trends in peatland forest disturbance, like deforestation or peat fires, that suggest human impact. I will then conduct an anthropological study to uncover how the peatland forest is linked to the local livelihoods of remote communities on the periphery of the peatland forest in DRC. This will bring me to DRC starting in March 2022. I will be sharing updates from the field on this website.
That's all for now. I hope you'll follow along on this groundbreaking scientific journey.
If you can't wait for the next update to learn more about the central Congo Basin peatlands, why not check out some of the recent media coverage that has explored different angles:
New York Times: What do the Protectors of Congo's peatland get in return?
New York Times: Meet peat, the unsung hero of carbon capture
MongaBay's 4-part series on The Congo Basin peatlands
To make peat news part of your regular twitter feed, follow @CongoPeat and me, of course, @shonajjenkins. And check out my website, People, Places and Peat where I will also be posting stories and pictures from the heart of the world’s largest tropical peatland in the Central Congo Basin.
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