The extent to which wetlands are responsible for climate change [ark] is becoming dreadfully clear. A recent international conference reveals wetlands [search] — including marshes, peat bogs, river deltas, mangroves, tundra, lagoons and river flood plains — contain 771 billion tons of greenhouse gases, one-fifth of all the carbon on Earth, equal to the amount of carbon now in the atmosphere.
Wetlands are a requirement for the Earth’s health. They account for 6 percent of Earth’s land surface and produce 25 percent of the world’s food, purify water, recharge aquifers and act as buffers against violent coastal storms. Some 60% of the Earth’s wetlands have been destroyed in the last century. Continued casual wetland destruction [search] — yet one more facet of modern human dismantling of the physical ecological systems that make the Earth habitable — may well release a “carbon bomb” that dramatically amplifies climate change and hastens general ecological collapse.