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Peatlands Around the World just a Keystroke Away

For Release 6th April 1999

Have you ever wondered whether there are bogs in Turkey? - or what a Japanese bog looks like ? - or what animals you might find in an Indonesian bog ?

Well if you have, its time you visited an exciting new section to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council's world wide web site - entitled Peatlands Around the World.

Follow the link from IPCC's home page at http://indigo.ie/~ipcc and visit bogs in 16 countries across four continents - Africa, Asia, Europe, and America.

With world peatlands covering 500 million hectares of land - that is about 8% of the world's surface - there are plenty of bogs to visit. On a global scale it is equivalent to the area of India and Pakistan covered in 5m of peat!

Bogs are important global wetland areas helping to maintain reliable supplies of clean water, acting as a ancient habitats for many rare and threatened species and containing an unparalleled record of our past. They contain 4 times as much carbon as is stored in all the world's tropical rainforests - giving them an importance in global climate change.

So if you want to visit some amazing peatlands in far flung places - and your budget is a bit tight - this is the only way to travel to see wetland wilderness areas around the world.

Editors Note 1. The IPCC would like to thank the following peatland conservationists and scientists for providing pictures of peatlands for our tour: Mara Pakalne - Latvia; Peter Foss - Ireland; Jack Rieley - Indonesia; Michael Steiner - Austria; Richard Lindsay - UK; Andrew Byfield - Turkey and Tatsuichi Tsujii - Japan.

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