Protecting Kenai Peninsula peatland as a carbon sink

[Ben Boettger]

“Northern latitude peatlands cover just 3% of the earth’s surface but hold about 30% of the world’s soil carbon. This means the soils on the Kenai Peninsula and elsewhere in most of Alaska serve as a critical global carbon repository.”

That’s from
the most recent Refuge Notebook column published by the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in the Peninsula Clarion. This one was written by Lehiegh University research Heidi Cunnick, who’s been studying vegetation change on the Kenai Peninsula. As local precipitation changes and glacial streams diminish, the Peninsula’s peatlands may start drying out — as John Morton said during his presentation at our first Drawdown meeting in April — and releasing their stored carbon.

Finding a way to preserve peatlands may be a worthwhile climate action for us to consider.

[Ben Boettger]

Here’s some general background information on the peatland carbon sequestration:

https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/peatlands-and-climate-change

In 2013 the Homer Soil and Water Conservation District surveyed 336,000 acres of wetlands between the Cook Inlet shore and the border of the Refuge, and found that much of was it peatland containing deep, carbon-sequestering organic soil. The surveyed area was overall about 41 percent wetland, in a less disturbed state than many wetlands in the lower 48. It was already starting to dry out, however. Ed Burg wrote a Refuge Notebook column about the drying of peatland and consequent vegetation changes in 2005, speculating that the drying of the peninsula’s wetlands had begun much earlier.

“The annual water balance (precipitation minus
potential evapotranspiration) declined almost 50% after the drought of 1968-69 and has never fully recovered, due to warmer summers,” he wrote. “It is likely that drying of the Peninsula began at that time, and it appears to have accelerated in the 1990s, as shown by recently dried up ponds and fallen water levels of closed-basin lakes.”

Conserving peatlands as carbon sinks should be part of our land use discussion in September. Last August the Kachemak Bay Research Reserve started exploring the possibility of offering Kenai peninsula peatland as an offset on the carbon market. Credits could be used to fund preservation projects — this is one practical land use idea we could look at advocating.

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