An environmental bomb is ticking underneath the peatlands of the Congo basin: Billions of tons of carbon that may eventually be released into the atmosphere...
A documentary by CANAL+ Docs
A documentary by CANAL+ Docs
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00:00This beer barrel is huge, bigger than the surface of a country like Great Britain.
00:30If it were all drained in the worst case scenario and all of it went into the atmosphere, that
00:57would be equivalent to three years' worth of global carbon dioxide emissions, or put
01:03differently, 20 years' worth of the emissions from the United States of America.
01:08So it's a huge amount of carbon stored there, and it needs to stay there.
01:23At the moment, we know where the peatland is, and we know how much carbon is stored.
01:29But we don't know how it works.
01:31We don't know how it functions.
01:32Why did it build up the way it did?
01:35What will happen in the future?
01:37What will happen under climate change?
01:39What happens if someone builds a drainage ditch?
01:41These peatlands are one way that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, so they're important
01:46in not adding to the problem by destroying it.
01:53The peatland is a stable ecosystem, still virgin, where there is almost no trace of human
02:17activity.
02:18The peatland is a stable ecosystem, where there is almost no trace of human activity.
02:25The peatland is a stable ecosystem, where there is almost no trace of human activity.
02:34The peatland is a stable ecosystem, where there is almost no trace of human activity.
03:01The peatland is a stable ecosystem, where there is almost no trace of human activity.
03:25the local indigenous populations that monitor the durability of this tree that sequesters carbon.
03:31Because tomorrow, if these trees disappear due to the non-surveillance by these populations,
03:36the catastrophe is global.