Climate worries about wetlands drive Brazil meeting

Washington/Rio de Janeiro - Worries about the rapid disappearance of the world's wetlands and its potential effect on global warming tops the agenda of 700 world experts who meet starting Monday in Cuiaba, Brazil. The United Nations University and Brazil's Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT), which co-organized the event, chose to meet on the edge of South America's Pantanal, said to be the world's largest wetlands, to make their point. The meeting concludes Friday. The world's wetlands store as much carbon as that held in the atmosphere today, but continuing destruction 'could cause them to exhale billows of greenhouse gases,' the organizers said in a statement. Climate scientists have reached a consensus in recent years that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are trapping increasing amounts of heat in the atmosphere and are the main culprits behind climate change. The gathering, the eighth International Wetlands Conference, is intended to take stock of global wetlands, identify knowledge gaps and 'offer plain-spoken policy prescriptions for decision makers with an appeal to adopt it with urgency,' said Paulo Speller, a professor at the Brazilian university, located in the province where much of the Pantanal lies. Wetlands such as peat bogs, swamps, river deltas, mangroves, tundra, lagoons and floodplains cover only 6 per cent of Earth's surface yet store up to 20 per cent of its terrestrial carbon, the experts noted. They slow the decay of organic material, filter out pollutants and 'act as sponges' and reservoirs, said Wolfgang Junk of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. Australia and the US have led he world in restoring and preserving wetlands, the scientists said. Some 60 per cent of the world's wetlands are estimated to have been lost in the last century. In Europe alone, especially in Greece and the Mediterranean rim, up to 90 per cent have been destroyed for agriculture and development. Scientists even put an economic value on wetlands of 15,000 dollars a year per hectare, in terms of flood prevention, filtering and water storage. The next most valuable ecosystem per hectare is tropical rainforest. The Pantanal includes more than 160,000 square kilometres of wetlands, rivers and swamps that nearly submerge during the rainy season. Part of it also lies in Bolivia and Paraguay.