Peatlands are increasingly playing a bigger role in forest conservation thanks to their extraordinary proficiency at carbon sequestration. In November Forests News reported that the ‘bogs’ had finally been given the spotlight. The newly established International Tropical Peatlands Center (ITPC) is set to open its doors in 2019, to bring ‘researchers, governments, civil society and other stakeholders together to ensure the conservation and sustainable management of peatlands throughout Southeast Asia, the Congo Basin and Peru’. We caught up with three scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) – a coordinating partner of ITPC and longtime peatlands analysist – to find out ‘why peatlands, and why now?’.

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