Viewed from the air, the vast, cool forests of the Kampar peninsula on Indonesia's Sumatra island are a world away from China's belching factories or America's clogged freeways.
But appearances can be deceptive.
Most of this 400,000 hectare peninsula is peatland: dense, swampy forest that, when healthy, efficiently soaks up greenhouse gases from the world's worst polluters.
When drained, cleared or burned, however, this wilderness transforms into one of the worst climate vandals, releasing six to nine times the amount of carbon stored in regular equatorial forests.
Swamps have not traditionally held the same ecological sex appeal as, say, doe-eyed wildlife. But as nations prepare for a major global conference on climate change in Indonesia next month, the world's focus is changing.
The Dec. 3 to Dec. 14 UN summit on the resort island of Bali will see international delegates thrash out a framework for negotiations on a global regime to combat climate change when the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.
A figure from the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research puts deforestation at around 25 percent of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions.
Avoiding emissions from deforestation has so far been left out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which focuses instead on reducing emissions from sources such as industry and transport.
Widespread deforestation has made Indonesia the third largest emitter of carbon in the world, the contribution coming most dramatically in the form of near-annual forest fires on islands such as Sumatra and Borneo.
The fires, which send choking smoke as far as Singapore and Malaysia, are for the most part caused by the clearing of peatlands. And the destruction of Indonesia's peatlands accounts for four percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Greenpeace.
Peatlands are not just a threat when they are burning. A flight over Kampar reveals scars of cleared land gouged from the forest, linked with canals built to transport legal and illegal logs to inland mills.
Much of the carbon released from peatland swamps is the result of draining so the land, or the logs, can be used, says Jonotoro, a peatlands expert at the forestry ministry and an independent consultant.
As the water level drops, more and more of the stock of carbon is released into the atmosphere.
In clear-cut areas, the temperature can rise dramatically in the dry months between July and September to around 70°C, up from a usual cool average of 28°C.
"If the peat is already dry, it's impossible to make it wet," Jonotoro said.
Peatland is made up of a waterlogged store of semi-decomposed vegetation, which squelches underfoot. The deeper the peatland - it can stretch to a depth of more than 15m - the more carbon it holds.
If set on fire, dry peatland can burn for weeks - the fire can be extinguished on the surface, only to continue burning underground and reappear the next day.
In Indonesia, the main driver for the destruction of peatlands is the world's appetite for wood, pulp and palm oil.
The best place for plantations is dry land, but as the rush for Indonesia's last wildernesses continues to turn much of the countryside into a landscape of industrial uniformity, any land will do.
At the western end of Kampar sits Pangkalan Kerinci, home of a massive pulp and paper mill belonging to Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL).
The mill - and the manicured company town that surrounds it - is the nerve center of a sprawling acacia plantation, much of which is on peatland.
APRIL is keen to boost its environmental credentials, running a tagging system to prevent illegal logging. Two of its security guards were killed in a 2002 confrontation with illegal loggers.
Still, seven of APRIL's partner companies are under investigation for illegally cutting forests.
A cornerstone of APRIL's green efforts is water management in its peatland plantations. At its nearby Pelalawan plantation, a 1,100km network of canals regulates water levels over 100,000 hectares of planted forest.
The goal of the management is to reduce emissions from the peatland beneath, explained Jouko Virta, head of APRIL's global fiber supply. By keeping the water table at the highest level tolerated by the plantation trees, Virta says carbon dioxide emissions from the peatland can be reduced by 80 percent.
The company is now pursuing an audacious plan to push into Kampar, converting more than 100,000 hectares around the peninsula's perimeter into more plantations, while leaving the center untouched.
APRIL says the move will reduce carbon emissions, since much of this perimeter is already heavily degraded, either by illegal loggers or old concessionaires.
By installing their own plantations and managing them responsibly, they believe they will keep illegal loggers from penetrating further inland.
"National parks are the happiest hunting grounds for illegal loggers, and the only way you can protect them is by building barriers," Virta said.
WWF reserved judgment on APRIL's plan, saying they needed to see evidence that the Kampar ring is really as degraded as the company says, and that emissions can actually be reined in as much as they say.
"I think we need to see the scientific analysis," said Nazir Foead, WWF's policy and corporate engagement director, adding that the organization was aiming to complete its own analysis by the Bali meeting next month.
Consultant Jonotoro is unconvinced by APRIL's optimism and said acacia plantations will never be a success on Kampar's nutrient-poor peatland.
"The main point of why they chose this area is because they need natural timber, big hardwood timber" for their mills, he said, referring to their legal practice of felling and processing the trees from their concessions before planting.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would