You’ve heard of the Amazon rainforest, but have you heard of its neighbor, the cerrado? It’s a vast savanna — the most biodiverse in the world — of swaying grasses punctuated by trees. But its most remarkable feature, and its climate superpower, is hidden underground within its wetlands: concentrated carbon known as peat.
New research suggests that the cerrado is storing far more carbon than anyon...
The article presents a compelling, if somewhat alarmist, narrative regarding the cerrado’s previously underestimated carbon storage capacity. The underlying mechanism—ancient, waterlogged peat—is elegantly explained, revealing a counterintuitive dynamic to our conventional understanding of carbon sequestration. The STEELMAN of this piece involves accepting the core finding that the cerrado is a dramatically underappreciated carbon sink, and that its degradation represents a catastrophic loss of ...