The planetary fix

Despite decades of inaction we can avert the climate Hellocene and restore the atmosphere to keep our world habitable

https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear


A heron at the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in Uarini, Amazonas state, Brazil, 7 March 2018. Photo by Bruno Kelly/Reuters



Whoosh. Our boat rocks a bit when a pink river dolphin surfaces and blows just a paddle’s length away. We’re in a low, open boat in western Brazil, a few hundred miles downriver from the borders of Colombia and Peru.

As a climate scientist at Stanford University, I’m here with colleagues at the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve deep in the Amazon to build new towers for monitoring emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, two of the world’s most powerful greenhouse gases. I study methane in particular because, pound for pound, it’s 90 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming Earth in the first two decades after release. And methane concentrations have risen faster in the past five years than at any time since record-keeping began, for reasons we’re still trying to understand.

The highest methane emissions in nature come from tropical wetlands and seasonally flooded forests – like here at Mamirauá – and they are expected to rise with warming. Mamirauá is the western jewel in a chain of national parks and reserves placed deep in the Amazon to protect biodiverse forests, and the primates, people and fish who call them home. Mamirauá includes Indigenous lands and promotes the wellbeing of the ribeirinhos – traditional peoples living in communities along the river who fish, farm, selectively cut trees, and make crafts for their livelihoods – hence its designation as a ‘sustainable development reserve’. A sanctum of water, sky, wetlands and trees, its water is rich and tea-stained. The air is redolent of mud.

Tropical wetlands yield so much methane because they are warm, wet (by definition) and low-oxygen environments perfect for growing methane-emitting microbes. But tropical wetlands and flooded forests are also the world’s least-studied ecosystems for methane emissions – and almost everything else, for that matter. They’re hard to reach and a challenge to keep instruments running in, thanks to everything from the constant humidity to rampant ants that short wires.

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