United Nations University
20-Jul-2008
700 leading experts convene at edge of Brazil’s vast Pantanal to take stock, offer policy prescription to remedy wetlands crisis
Leading world scientists convene in Brazil July 21-25 amid growing concern that evaporation and ongoing destruction of world wetlands, which hold a volume of carbon similar to that in the atmosphere today, could cause them to exhale billows of greenhouse gases.
Meeting in the city of Cuiaba on the edge of South America’s vast Pantanal, the largest wetland of its kind, some 700 experts from 28 nations at the 8th INTECOL International Wetlands Conference will prescribe measures urgently needed to better understand and manage these vibrant ecosystems, ranked among the planet’s most threatened, and slow their decline and loss.
Warming world temperatures are speeding both rates of decomposition of trapped organic material and evaporation, while threatening critical sources of wetlands recharge by melting glaciers and reducing precipitation.
Full release text: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-07/unu-mgg071408.php
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