Swamps may be key to fighting climate change

The humble swamp, or freshwater wetland, could be up to 50 times more effective in storing carbon than rainforests in the battle against climate change, a new study has found.
The research involved quantifying the level of carbon stocks in south-west Victorian wetlands, as well as identifying the impact of wetland restoration on those stocks.
"Our current usage of natural resources is unsustainable, and it is likely to become even more so under climate change," said Dr Rebecca Lester from Deakin University in Australia.
Quantifying ecosystem function, like carbon capture, under different management strategies is very important for applied ecology, researchers said.

"Our preliminary studies suggest that wetlands can sequester up to 33 per cent of the carbon in terrestrial soils, yet they only take up about four per cent of the Earth's land surface," said Lester.
Lester said the researchers were confident wetlands were a huge storage that had not previously been quantified in efforts to account for source and sinks of carbon globally.

"While research on carbon capture has so far focused on terrestrial and coastal ecosystems, such as carbon farming initiatives and so-called 'blue carbon' capture through seagrass, recent data indicates freshwater ecosystems could be up to 50 times more effective in carbon burial efficiencies, compared to land-based ecosystems like rainforests," Lester said.

"Despite the clear potential for wetlands to mitigate climate change, to our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify sequestration in temperate freshwater Australian wetlands, and one of few worldwide," Lester added.
"One of the reasons wetlands may be better than forests at carbon capture is because of the way sediments and organic matter, such as leaves, build up under water. There, they are likely to break down more slowly, thus acting as a carbon sink," she said.
Once covering around 10 per cent of the Earth's land mass, wetlands - which are often seasonal - are defined as low-lying areas that support plants and animals that rely on surface water.