Gold mining accelerates carbon release in Peruvian Amazon Brands: Destruction rate in two years of these very important accumulations exceeds the accumulated damage in the previous 30 years.
More than half of all the destruction of carbon rich halls in the southern Peruvian Amazon was in just two years, and the culprit of this rapid crisis is the Golden Minas Gerais Exploration.
Made on a small scale, especially in the Mother of Dios region there is a long time associated with deforestation, the extraction of gold is ending the large quantities of carbon underground, according to new discoveries shared in study this Tuesday in Environmental Research Letters.
According to the study, the region has lost more than 550 hectares of peats in the last two years, and freed about 0.2 to 0.7 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere. But what most alarmed the researchers was the drastic acceleration of this process: the destruction rate in this short time exceeds the accumulated damage in the previous 30 years.
Breaks are fundamental in combating climate change because they store carbon more denser than forests. In the specific case of the southern peruvian Amazon peats, they store both carbon and forests would store in a seven -time area, according to the investigation: even the loss of peaks on a smaller scale continues severely for greenhouse gas emissions and the worsening global warming.
Using NASA’s Landsat satellite satellite data, the researchers followed the expansion of mining exploration in these areas rich in carbon. Although the mining exploration on peats currently represents about 9% of the total mining activity in the region, this percentage is growing rapidly: In 2027, the mining exploration of peats could represent 25% of all mining activities in the region.
63 of the 219 zones of peats identified, with more than 10,000 hectares of hambers at immediate risk. If the situation remains, the release of up to 14.5 million tons of carbon – the equivalent of annual emissions of millions of cars – is the most likely scenario.
“Minas Gerais exploration is spreading quickly to these fragile areas because it has become easier to reach these remote points of mining exploration and there is not enough law application to protect the area. If we do not slow down the destruction, the damage to the Amazonian peats may be permanent, with serious environmental, social and economic impacts in the long run, ”explains John Householder, the study’s main author, quoted by.
In addition, “there are many other sites where considerable amounts of peat is suspected, but land data to test these suspicions are simply not available (…) even in the space of a human generation, it is quite possible that large peak deposits disappear from the landscape before science has had the opportunity to describe them. For peat deposits that are already known, these investigation results are a warning sign to protect them. ”
