HACKER Q&A
📣 DoreenMichele

I need help with some math


Since the 1700s, the world has lost more than 85 percent of its wetlands. Peatlands cover just 3 percent of the planet’s surface but they store about 30 percent of all land-based carbon, or twice as much as all of the world’s forests combined. Coastal wetlands remove atmospheric CO2 up to fifty-five times faster than rain forests.

So we would need to increase our wetlands 6 2/3 fold to get back to what we had in the 1700s.

I'm curious how close that would get us to fixing human-caused climate change.

I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of figures. What factors do I need to even begin to calculate this?

  👤 subject4056 Accepted Answer ✓
You ought to begin by getting really good citations on each of those figures. If you or the source you got them from had any confusion about how to arrive at those numbers, any results you get from them will likely be meaningless.

Hopefully in doing so you will start to notice the missing pieces of info and can ask more targeted questions to get better results.

👤 meristohm
I don't have an answer to the math question but carbon sequestration is an important topic. Related, sometimes with pop-sci/layperson citations:

-Beavers will play a role in bringing back wetlands. They can do it better than we can. See book: Eager, by Ben Goldfarb (maybe you've read it already?)

-Reversing climate change feels like it is going to require a massive cultural shift. To get to the point of large-scale wetland recovery we'll need government regulation and widespread public support and cooperation. I don't know this happens within the next seven years or so, but it has to. Maybe it'll turn out that Voyageur 2 has revealed our position to the Vogons.

👤 defrost
A good place to start is current studies on peat and wetlands.

From https://phys.org/search/?search=peat

* Re-wetting is key for boosting carbon dioxide storage in southern peatlands ( https://phys.org/news/2023-09-re-wetting-key-boosting-carbon... )

* Officially endangered: Critical environmental research saving Western Australia's precious peatlands ( https://phys.org/news/2023-09-endangered-critical-environmen... )

* Rewetting German marshes to blunt climate change impact ( https://phys.org/news/2023-07-rewetting-german-marshes-blunt... )

etc.

Reading the types of papers these articles overview will provide some insight into the weighting factors deemed important for these kinds of calculations.