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DRAINING AND burning of the world’s peat bogs accounts for about 5.5 per cent of global carbon emissions but are currently excluded from governments’ climate targets and UN talks, a study has revealed.

Peat stores about twice as much carbon as all the world’s trees, but compared with the well-publicised issues of fossil fuels and forests, the sector was the “Cinderella” of climate change policies, said Hans Joosten at Germany’s Greifswald University, co-author of the report.