An international partnership of UK and Congolese scientists has found that the peatlands span 16.7 million hectares, equivalent to the size of England and Wales combined.

Led by the University of Leeds in the UK and the University of Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the researchers spent three years visiting scientifically unexplored swamp forests in the DRC.

For the first time, the researchers have shown extensive peatlands in DRC, with peat up to six and a half metres deep. Their findings, published today in Nature Geoscience, show that the peatlands in the central Congo Basin store between 26 and 32 billion tonnes of carbon – roughly the equivalent to three years’ worth of global fossil fuel emissions.

The central Congo Basin is home to 36% of the world’s tropical peat

Read more at: University of Leeds

• Sci/Tech
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