Widespread subsidence and carbon emissions across Southeast Asian peatlands

Hoyt, Alison M.; Chaussard, Estelle; Seppalainen, S. S.; Harvey, Charles F.

doi:10.1038/s41561-020-0575-4

Cited by 90 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The forest carbon results reported here do not include measures of belowground carbon conservation in mineral soils or peatland, the latter of which stores more carbon than aboveground forest biomass in Borneo (35) and is particularly vulnerable to carbon loss and subsidence following deforestation events (36). We also do not include measures of forest regrowth in preserved areas or previously degraded areas being restored through intervention activities (37), which undoubtedly amplified carbon storage and sequestration benefits of the intervention.…”

Section: Villagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving rural health care reduces illegal logging and conserves carbon in a tropical forest

Jones

MacDonald

Hopkins

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Tropical forest loss currently exceeds forest gain, leading to a net greenhouse gas emission that exacerbates global climate change. This has sparked scientific debate on how to achieve natural climate solutions. Central to this debate is whether sustainably managing forests and protected areas will deliver global climate mitigation benefits, while ensuring local peoples’ health and well-being. Here, we evaluate the 10-y impact of a human-centered solution to achieve natural climate mitigation through reductions in illegal logging in rural Borneo: an intervention aimed at expanding health care access and use for communities living near a national park, with clinic discounts offsetting costs historically met through illegal logging. Conservation, education, and alternative livelihood programs were also offered. We hypothesized that this would lead to improved health and well-being, while also alleviating illegal logging activity within the protected forest. We estimated that 27.4 km2 of deforestation was averted in the national park over a decade (∼70% reduction in deforestation compared to a synthetic control, permuted P = 0.038). Concurrently, the intervention provided health care access to more than 28,400 unique patients, with clinic usage and patient visitation frequency highest in communities participating in the intervention. Finally, we observed a dose–response in forest change rate to intervention engagement (person-contacts with intervention activities) across communities bordering the park: The greatest logging reductions were adjacent to the most highly engaged villages. Results suggest that this community-derived solution simultaneously improved health care access for local and indigenous communities and sustainably conserved carbon stocks in a protected tropical forest.

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Section: Villagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving rural health care reduces illegal logging and conserves carbon in a tropical forest

Jones

MacDonald

Hopkins

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…InSAR-based subsidence measurement involves measuring phase changes in the reflected radar beam between subsequent passes of an observing satellite, allowing for millimeter-scale sensitivity to changes in elevation. We then estimated carbon fluxes associated with the subsidence data using the approach outlined by Hoyt et al (2020), as described further in Text S1 of the supporting information (Couwenberg & Hooijer, 2013;Leifeld et al, 2011;van den Akker et al, 2008;Van den Wyngaert, 2008). These estimates are not presented for use as emissions factors, but rather to provide a rough estimate of emissions associated with subsidence due to drainage; these estimates are uncertain due in part to the fact that subsidence rates are determined not only by oxidation, but also compaction, shrinkage, and consolidation of peat at lower depths (Hooijer et al, 2012).…”

Section: Subsidence Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In mapping peatland drainage across the region for the first time, we find that subsidence rates (and associated carbon emissions) are higher in areas with progressively higher drainage density. To assess the effect of drainage on subsidence, we compared drainage density to subsidence rates measured from 2007 to 2011 (Hoyt et al, 2020), and found that High drainage density areas have median subsidence rates that are 1.3X larger than in Moderate drainage density areas, 1.5X larger than in Low drainage density areas, and 3.2X larger than in areas with no drainage ( Figure 6). This relationship holds even though drainage density data were measured 8 years after the subsidence measurements.…”

Section: Drainage Density Predicts Subsidencementioning

confidence: 99%

Drainage Canals in Southeast Asian Peatlands Increase Carbon Emissions

et al. 2021

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In these wetland environments, persistent flooding and anoxic conditions suppress decomposition rates, allowing organic material to accumulate over time in deep peat deposits. This process, compounded over millennia, has made Southeast Asian (SEA) peatlands one of the world's largest terrestrial pools of organic carbon: an estimated 67 Gt of carbon are stored in peatlands in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei (Page et al., 2011; Warren et al., 2017). In recent decades, this carbon sink has been

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“…However, human-induced changes in effective stress, driven by excessive fluid production/injection operations in subsurface formations, occurs rapidly 20 . For instance, global overexploitation of groundwater from many giant aquifers, especially in northern China, India, Pakistan, Iran, and the United States (US), has caused vast land subsidence, fault reactivation, and induced seismicity 15 , 21 – 24 . In the US, 45 states with an area of more than 40,000 km 2 have been affected by extensive land subsidence due to the compaction of aquifers and the collapse of cavities in carbonates 25 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Poromechanical controls on spontaneous imbibition in earth materials

Haghi

Chalaturnyk

Blunt

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Over the last century, the state of stress in the earth’s upper crust has undergone rapid changes because of human activities associated with fluid withdrawal and injection in subsurface formations. The stress dependency of multiphase flow mechanisms in earth materials is a substantial challenge to understand, quantify, and model for many applications in groundwater hydrology, applied geophysics, CO2 subsurface storage, and the wider geoenergy field (e.g., geothermal energy, hydrogen storage, hydrocarbon recovery). Here, we conduct core-scale experiments using N2/water phases to study primary drainage followed by spontaneous imbibition in a carbonate specimen under increasing isotropic effective stress and isothermal conditions. Using X-ray computed micro-tomography images of the unconfined specimen, we introduce a novel coupling approach to reconstruct pore-deformation and simulate multiphase flow inside the deformed pore-space followed by a semi-analytical calculation of spontaneous imbibition. We show that the irreducible water saturation increases while the normalized volume of spontaneously imbibed water into the specimen decreases (46–25%) in response to an increase in effective stress (0–30 MPa), leading to higher residual gas saturations. Furthermore, the imbibition rate decreases with effective stress, which is also predicted by a numerical model, due to a decrease in water relative permeability as the pore-space becomes more confined and tortuous. This fundamental study provides new insights into the physics of multiphase fluid transport, CO2 storage capacity, and recovery of subsurface resources incorporating the impact of poromechanics.

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Widespread subsidence and carbon emissions across Southeast Asian peatlands

Cited by 90 publications

References 39 publications

Improving rural health care reduces illegal logging and conserves carbon in a tropical forest

Improving rural health care reduces illegal logging and conserves carbon in a tropical forest

Drainage Canals in Southeast Asian Peatlands Increase Carbon Emissions

Poromechanical controls on spontaneous imbibition in earth materials

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