New research finds substantial peat deposits in Colombia’s conflicted Amazon

In the heart of the Colombian Amazon, the towering mountains of the Serranía del Chiribiquete harbor secrets including South America’s oldest rock art. The remote site was off-limits and poorly known for decades, as Chiribiquete National Park was also a stronghold for the guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Now, in the wake of a shaky peace process that has provided greater security and access to some regions, the park is revealing another secret: In the shadow of the mountains lie some of the densest peat deposits in South America.

Peat is the accumulation of partially decayed organic matter in wetlands, compressed by time into dense soils that store more carbon per hectare than any other type of landscape. When left undisturbed, peatlands grow slowly every year, locking away carbon in low-oxygen water that prevents full decomposition.

But when people drain and dry peatlands for agriculture, they can become “carbon bombs,” rapidly releasing massive amounts of planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The burning of huge peat areas in Indonesia in recent years has covered the country in smoke and made it one of the world’s worst carbon emitters from land use change.

A new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, reveals that peatlands in Colombia — poorly known before now — are widespread and carbon-dense, making the country the site of South America’s largest known reserves, after Peru.

Carried out with painstaking ground-truthing amid a fluctuating security situation, the study highlights the need to understand and conserve these vast wild landscapes to avoid potentially devastating greenhouse gas emissions and protect the unique biodiversity and local communities that call them home.

Mapping hidden carbon

Conserving carbon-intense peatlands is viewed as vital to curbing climate change. However, peatlands are relatively poorly mapped in the tropics. The Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin in Peru was only recognized as the largest peatland in the Amazon in 2009, while the Congo Basin’s even vaster peatlands weren’t mapped until 2017. Any effort to protect peatlands relies first on finding them.

But that’s a problem because peat soils cannot be delimited solely based on satellite imagery — their identification requires boots on the ground. Researchers need to take multiple soil cores from across a wetland to determine whether peat exists, and if so, how far down it goes. Analysis of these soil cores can determine carbon density and the length of time peat has been accumulating.

Colombia has long been a blank spot on the map of tropical peatlands, with estimates based only on satellite imagery or primitive soil maps differing by orders of magnitude. The expansion of Colombia’s internal conflict and the growth of armed groups from the mid-1990s onward has made on-the-ground sampling nearly impossible in most of its rainforest regions. But the peace efforts that Colombia’s government initiated with armed groups in 2016 provided an opening.

Starting in 2020, an international team led by University of California Santa Cruz assistant professor Scott Winton and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana professor Juan Carlos Benavides began to fill in those blank spots. They traveled to remote wetlands in the Amazon Rainforest and in Colombia’s vast Llanos savanna, searching for peat where it was most likely to occur and also where it was unexpected.

They then combined their below-ground observations with satellite imagery and built a model based on the spectral signals found in the imagery to predict where peat would occur and how much would be there. The researchers estimate that Colombia’s peatlands hold 1.9 petagrams of carbon, or 1.9 million million kilograms — the equivalent of 70 years of the nation’s average annual emissions.

“There is very little boots-on-the-ground work that has been conducted across Central and South America (particularly in the tropical region) because the forests are so large, access is very limited and there are challenges to working in these environments,” said Julie Loisel, a physical geographer at the University of Nevada, Reno, who was not involved in the study. She stressed that the team’s combination of ground-truthing and remote sensing is the best way to produce these estimates.

The researchers found important peat deposits in several unexpected places. Peat was not predicted for the seasonally dry Llanos, for example, because constant flooding is required for peat to form. But the team found important deposits in the gallery forests and swamps along the rivers that run through the Llanos, raising the possibility that peat might have been underestimated in other seasonal wetlands, including Brazil’s Pantanal.

The team also documented the first peat deposits found in white-sand forests. These poorly known ecosystems occur on extremely nutrient-poor soils eroded from the ancient Guiana Shield and harbor a unique stunted forest type along with several endemic bird species.

Sand isn’t expected to hold water and form peat, but the team suspects that a bedrock layer underlies these sandy deposits, locking water in. White-sand forests cover massive areas of northern South America, suggesting substantial unmapped peat deposits in Venezuela, Brazil and the Guianas.

Navigating insecurity

The study team took advantage of the Colombian peace process, ongoing since 2016, to sample wetlands in areas previously controlled by FARC and other rebels. However, many parts of the country remain too dangerous for scientists to work in, contributing to uncertainty in their peatland estimates. In other places, including the team’s northernmost research sites, armed activity has resumed, so revisiting those sites is an impossibility for now.

“You have to read the landscape around you; when people tell you, “Don’t go,” you just don’t go,” says co-author Benavides. “Everything that is in the site can be lost at any moment, so you plan for that.… You never know if you are coming back.”

The sporadic conflict makes this study a unique snapshot of the region that will likely be difficult to replicate in the near future. “Now it would be unwise to go to some of the places they went,” says Dolors Armenteras, a professor at the National University of Colombia who studies deforestation and landscape ecology. “That would be really dangerous.”

For many Colombians, the peace process has been disappointing. After a decrease in violence, conflict has increased across the country in recent years. While FARC largely demobilized, a breakaway holdout group, the Central Armed Command (EMC), now controls much of Colombia’s Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare departments. These provinces hold substantial forest tracts that may be underlain by peat-forming wetlands, but these areas are also on the frontier of deforestation.

“There has always been a debate about whether the conflict in Colombia preserves biodiversity or enhances forest loss,” Armenteras says. The answer, she says, depends on the time and place, with armed groups alternately protecting forests to shield their movements and selling logging concessions to raise revenue.

But since the implementation of the peace process, deforestation rates have been rising rather than decreasing, as Armenteras predicted. The collapse of the FARC-dominated security order has left many areas ungoverned, leading to an expansion of the illegal drug trade and ranching. That poses a threat to some of Colombia’s newly mapped peatlands.

“In Caquetá, especially, we saw a lot of clearance of the riparian corridors and even Mauritia palms that had been chainsawed and burned, which is explicitly illegal,” says Winton, lead author of the study. “If you look at time series of satellite imagery there, you can see how there’s clearance of forest cover on headwater streams.”

The current Colombian government under President Gustavo Petro is vocally committed to environmentalism and lowering Colombia’s deforestation rate. In response, armed groups like the EMC have facilitated some deforestation to apply pressure in peace negotiations, using the Amazon as a bargaining chip to secure a better deal.

Missing the forest for the trees

In recent years, major peatland discoveries in Peru and the Congo Basin have attracted international attention and proposals to protect them via payment-for-ecosystem-services (PES) initiatives. The idea would be to pay countries or local communities for emissions avoided when they preserve peatlands, rather than converting them to agricultural production.

Now that vast stores of carbon have been discovered in peatlands across Colombia as well, the question becomes how to save them — especially in a country still rife with conflict and lawlessness.

The United Nations’ REDD+ program offers a potential PES model for valuing forests and wetlands and protecting them. But these initiatives are difficult to implement where good governance is lacking.

Most Colombian projects would need to occur in extremely remote areas, with weak or no control by the government, which would make monitoring and enforcement extremely difficult. A 2021 study found that REDD+ programs are struggling to show success in Guaviare after the transition from FARC to EMC control.

Many researchers have been exploring synergies between REDD+ and development in the Colombian context, hoping that PES can go hand in hand with peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict areas.

But there’s another problem: Existing REDD+ programs of all kinds have been coming under increasing scrutiny in Colombia, with a recent hearing in the legislature highlighting multiple abuses. In one example, carbon credits were sold to Chevron without the knowledge of the Andean Indigenous community living on the land.

The more than 70 REDD+ projects active in Colombia are also limited in scope, with almost all focused only on conserving above-ground carbon. Benavides says he believes this is a shortsighted approach.

“The Amazon is more than trees,” he says. “The national level [of government] is dominated by forestry engineers who only see trees; they don’t care about soil processes. But soil has more carbon than trees.”

Existing peatland PES models, like those in Indonesia, typically pay for peatland restoration, reflooding drained degraded wetlands to prevent their burning and decay. But programs that could protect the vast, intact deposits found in the Congo, Peru and now Colombia would need to operate under a more challenging model: paying to head off more distant threats — a hard sell before destruction is imminent.

“Since these ecosystems are not recognized at the national level, the country doesn’t use them in their [carbon accounting] reports,” Benavides says. “But if the country doesn’t use them in their reports, then you’re not allowed to access the [country-level carbon] markets. You end up in something called the ‘voluntary market,’” where, Benavides says, the carbon payments available to credit-sellers are valued much lower.

If these PES programs can be retooled, they could potentially provide a financial incentive to local communities that might work in tandem with peace efforts to help smooth the transition from rebel to government control in the Amazon — conserving forests and peatlands while promoting sustainable development

But in the more remote areas of the Colombian Amazon, where peatlands and forests are currently seeing little developmental pressure, incorporating these landscapes into carbon schemes — if local communities are not involved in decision-making — could constrain the sovereignty of Indigenous people who have contributed nothing to global carbon emissions.

“There are huge barriers, some political, some technical, and then there’s access to the sites,” says Benavides when asked about the prospect of REDD+ programs as a means of conserving Colombia’s peatlands. “But I think that there’s an invisible barrier that is ethical, that is, ‘Can we do this? Do we need to do this? Do we have a right to bring some land use control so that people can no longer use these lands in their natural, organic or traditional ways, because there is some interest that will pay them some money in the future?’”

Banner image: Members of the international research team pull a peat core out of a wetland in the Colombian Amazon. Image by Scott Winton.

Indigenous communities come together to protect the Colombian Amazon

Citations:

Winton, R. S., Benavides, J. C., Mendoza, E., Uhde, A., Hastie, A., Honorio Coronado, E. N., … Hoyt, A. M. (2025). Widespread carbon-dense peatlands in the Colombian lowlands. Environmental Research Letters, 20(5), 054025. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/adbc03

Dargie, G. C., Lewis, S. L., Lawson, I. T., Mitchard, E. T., Page, S. E., Bocko, Y. E., & Ifo, S. A. (2017). Age, extent and carbon storage of the central Congo basin peatland complex. Nature, 542(7639), 86-90. doi:10.1038/nature21048

Rodríguez-de-Francisco, J. C., Del Cairo, C., Ortiz-Gallego, D., Velez-Triana, J. S., Vergara-Gutiérrez, T., & Hein, J. (2021). Post-conflict transition and REDD+ in Colombia: Challenges to reducing deforestation in the Amazon. Forest Policy and Economics, 127, 102450. doi:10.1016/j.forpol.2021.102450

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