 Well, IPCC is really well-known for the assessment reports that it puts out. But IPCC does a little bit more than that. And IPCC produces methodology reports, which are perhaps less well-known, but perhaps even more central to the UNSCCC process. Being able to inventory and quantify greenhouse gas emissions is really what spurs action. And understanding how greenhouse gas emissions are evolving, which countries are emitting how much, from what sources, is really what guides policy and guides international and national action on mitigating greenhouse gases. So IPCC produces guidelines for national greenhouse gas inventory. And I joined the IPCC efforts for this back in 2004, when we produced the 2006 guidelines. And one of the gaps in the 2006 guidelines was the lack of data and lack of ability to put together emissions factors for tropical wetlands. The 2006 guidelines had five volumes. The fourth volume was the one on agricultural forestry and land use. And the agricultural forestry land use covered six land uses. It covered forest lands, croplands, grasslands, settlements, other lands, and wetlands. And a lot of the wetlands was actually dealt with in an appendix there, because the data was inadequate and the data was controversial. The emissions factors that were put out for tropical wetlands, particularly for nitrous oxide and methane, were essentially the temperate factors multiplied by 2, because the emissions had to be much higher in the tropics. There was no data for the tropical emissions factors. And there was actually precious little data for good emissions factors in the temperate zone. And that lack, I think, spurred the scientific community to invest time and effort to collect some of that data. And so the wetlands supplement was commissioned and began work in 2011 on that. The supplement was finally accepted in 2013 at the IPCC plan area in Batumi, Georgia, and published earlier this year, or last year in 2014. But I want to talk a little bit about the review process that it goes through. The IPCC publications go through a very rigorous review process. For example, in the expert review, which was the review of the first order draft we put out, we had over 5,000 comments from 128 experts across the globe. And 1,400 of those comments were on the chapter that I happen to draw by chance. So I was working on the drain inland organic soils, which is essentially emissions from peatlands and mucks. And that was one of the most controversial chapters. It then went out for a government and expert review. The first review was only done by experts. The second review is done by experts and governments. It came back with almost 4,000 comments. And about 800, 900 comments were on that particular chapter. It then goes out for a final government review after we responded in two rounds of review. And we still had another 350-odd comments coming back. I think about 50 or so of the comments were on the organic soils chapter. But the drain organic soils chapter provides updated methods and updated emissions factors for these inventories. Governments, when they do not have enough data to complete their inventory, the IPCC provides what we call Tier 1 emissions factors. And a Tier 1 emissions factor is the best scientific guess we can make that's better than zero. So when a country doesn't have data and an emission source is a minor portion of a country's national greenhouse gas inventory, they use these Tier 1 factors. If the emission source is a large portion of the total emissions or the total uncertainty around the inventory, countries need to invest in generating data. But typically we see countries doing what we call Tier 1.5. They have a little bit of data. They mix it with some IPCC methods and they produce greenhouse gas inventories this way. And this is very much the case in many tropical countries where countries don't have a lot of data and a lot of scientific capacity to go around generating these emissions factors. So we dealt with these, so to put these together, we had to delve into the literature and actually pull information out of a wide range of studies. And I want to underline there are two major methods that are used to quantify greenhouse gas emissions. And I'm going to talk primarily about carbon because carbon is the big number and it's also the controversial number. There are two methods to estimate carbon emissions from drained peatlands. One is to actually put chambers out over the soil and these chambers are typically about a quarter of a square meter and you spread them around a site and you take measurements of the carbon coming out of the soil. We use an infrared gas analyzer to do that. It's a very technical process. It requires teams in the field making measurements. And it requires an intensity of sampling because you want to capture the whole annual cycle. You also want to begin to try and capture inter-annual variability because rain that falls on the peatlands has an effect of fertilization. If you're dealing with crops on peatlands has effects on the carbon dioxide emissions. So it requires a fairly labor-intensive approach. A second approach looks at subsidence. So when you take the water out of a peatland, peatlands are naturally formed as a dome. You have sort of in between two rivers or in between two drainages, rivers or streams. You have sort of an elevated area between those. As you take the water out and drain that, that elevated area begins to collapse. And the collapse is a result of actually four processes, only one of which is greenhouse gas emissions. You have compaction. As the weight of the soil builds up over the drained area, because you drain to a certain level, there's also pressure on the area below the water table where there's still a lot of buoyancy that results in some compression of that layer. There's also shrinkage and swell. And that's particularly important for short-term measurements when you're trying to look at subsidence, when you're trying to measure the rate of change of the elevation. As the rain falls onto the surface, the fibers can shrink and swell. And this shrink and swell could be as much as 30% of the annual variation of the rise and fall of the peat surface. And for short-term measurements, this actually poses a lot of problems because if you have an uncertainty about 30% of how much subsidence has occurred in the course of a year, you have maybe 30% uncertainty introduced in your estimate of what the emissions are. So we were challenged by putting these two methods together, but also dealing with all the uncertainties of these methods as we put these emissions factors together. And so we took a couple of different approaches. I don't know if anyone has read Nate Silver's book. It's called The Signal and the Noise, how to, how, why certain relationships hold up and others don't. And why certain projections hold up and others don't. So it's all about how to use data for prediction and how we often misuse data for prediction. One of the things that he underlines is when you have a lot of uncertainty, there's a robustness in approaching a problem from multiple directions and then taking the average. You do a much better job than, because it tends to average out the biases of the different people and the different approaches. And so that's essentially what we did. So for each one of these studies that we looked at, all of them were incomplete, all of them had assumptions. And so we then, we did sort of site by site calculations. We did some generic calculations. We looked at a mass balance approach and we figured the best number we could get out of all the studies that had anything to say about root mortality and turnover. Anything that had anything to say about litter fall because these are the input terms to your mass balance. This is the carbon that's coming into your peak system. We looked at everything that had, they quantified total emissions from soil respiration, which is what's most commonly measured by chamber measurements. We looked at what was the best estimate of the fraction of that that's actually comes from peak decomposition. And so we did these generic calculations and we then compared them with the best estimate of the site by site calculations, also filling in the gaps. We did the same thing for the substance study. So very often the rate of elevation was measured, but perhaps carbon density wasn't measured or bulk density or change in bulk density was measured. We were missing a lot of longitude and functional information. People didn't have initial pre-drainage data in a lot of cases. And so we put those all together and we came up with a set of emissions factors that we think are reasonably robust given the current data set. And those emissions factors range from a fairly low level of about one and a half tons of carbon per hectare per year for low-intensity cultivation systems like SEGO palm, or SEGO is a cycad that's produced here, it's an important staple. It's basically grown in undrained conditions or very lightly drained conditions. The most intensive, the highest emissions factor that we found was associated with acacia plantations. All acacia plantations happened in essentially in Riau, Jambi and Sumatra, Celaton. And we came up with an estimate of about 20 tons of carbon per hectare per year. So there's a wide variation. We're going between one and a half and 20 tons of carbon per hectare per year. Oil palm, the average fell at around 11. And we found a wide variation across the landscapes where oil palm was cultivated. So for example, in Sumatra we have very high emissions on the order of 18 to 22, 24 tons of carbon per hectare per year. In Malaysia we found very low emissions in the literature. And on the order of six to eight tons of carbon per hectare per year, Sarawak seems to be closer to mainland Malaysia. Southern Borneo seems to be closer to Sumatra. But still lower than Sumatra. So when we average it all out, the oil palm comes out to around 11. And this created a bit of controversy because many people believe that oil palm and acacia, because they're both deeply drained, have very high emissions. And so there was a lot of questions raised around, why do we have such different numbers? The reality is that acacia, where acacia and oil palm are grown in similar conditions, we see very similar emissions. In Jambi, for example, or in Riau, if you measure acacia plantations and you measure oil palm plantations near each other, you get very similar numbers. But all the data for our emissions factor for acacia are just from the Kampar Peninsula, from one part of Riau. So we don't have a good range of data over the whole area where it's grown, but also acacia isn't grown nearly as widely as oil palm. And oil palm is grown typically on shallow peats. Most of the data comes from deep peats. It's very extensively grown on shallow peats in mainland Malaysia, and those data show very low values. So I think this averaging approach gave us a reasonably robust emissions factor. Certainly the best the data can provide, and at least now we have data-driven emissions factors for tropical peatlands. And these emissions factors are important, in particular for Indonesia. And Indonesia is using the IPCC emissions factors as a tier two factor, because all the data come either from Malaysia or Indonesia, okay? The measurements have not yet been made in Peru, and Christelle is starting some of that work in Peru right now trying to get those numbers. But it's important because for Indonesia, 30 to 50% of the emissions come from these peatlands. And so getting a good number on that has been really important. Indonesia has used these numbers in its reference emissions level, which we understand will be submitted in Paris. It's using it in the Indonesian carbon accounting system. So the work that we were able to synthesize with our partners in the IPCC is proving very useful. And I should indicate that the partnerships were, Christelle and I worked on the part of C4, but we also had partnerships from the Indonesian Solar Research Institute, Famud and Agus worked with us on this. Supyandi Sabiham from the university in Bogor worked with us on this. And we brought in a number of other interested parties to work with us on this. Some people from the private sector, some people from the NGO sector, to help us sort through the data and come to a consensus on this. So I think we come to a reasonably good consensus. But I think there's some interesting lessons that we need to understand that for the science to be better, particularly, and I'd like to separate these recommendations actually by method. So, methods, scientists that are working on these subsidence methods are working with a lot of unvalidated assumptions. There's a lot of assumptions that shrink swell is not an important factor over very short-term measurements, and there's reason to believe that maybe that's not the case, and so we need to begin measuring that. There are assumptions that over short-term measurements, consolidation below the water table is negligible, and we can ignore those terms. We need to actually question those. These are some of the things that are being left out. So a lot of the parameters are actually poorly measured or not measured at all. And typically we see in the scientific literature that the things that are easy to quantify are the things that are quantified. So there's a lot of good measurements of the change in elevation of the peatlands, but all the underlying processes are not brought out. And so we need to begin doing that much better and making those measurements. We also need to be quantifying uncertainty, much more robustly. Typically the substance literature publishes a value with no uncertainty. There's no standard error. There's no attempt at error propagation. No attempt at sensitivity analysis. And Crystal's done a nice sensitivity analysis and showed it's very easy to get a number that's higher or lower than the average by a factor of two because of the sensitivity of a couple of key parameters, notably bulk density and carbon density of the peat. And the other problem with the method is there's no internal constraint. There's no way to set an upper or lower bound on the estimate as there is with some of the chamber-based methods. But the chamber-based methods also pose a number of problems. In most of the studies, the number of key parameters are not measured. When you put a chamber over a soil, you're measuring total soil respiration, only part of which actually comes from peat decomposition because the roots that are in the ecosystem with you also respire. And so not quantifying and not separating the root respiration from the peat decomposition respiration makes it difficult to figure out just how much carbon you're losing from the system. The inputs are often not measured and emission is just reported as the total CO2 that's going out of the system. It'll be that's equivalent to measuring your bank account by just looking at the checks you write and not taking in the deposits. You eventually predict that you're gonna run out of money but you're not taking into account that you're actually putting money into your account. We have to have better full mass balances in the studies that are being reported. We need to understand the ecosystem processes better because we're being asked to predict. We have very little data. We need to be developing better models but you shouldn't develop complicated models when you have poor data. So we need to understand the underlying processes of what's controlling the temporal and the spatial variability of these emissions processes. And the studies need better site descriptions. We had a real tough time in the IPCC actually understanding what had been measured and there were many studies that looked like they were on a same site as another study and it was very difficult. We actually had to call up the authors and find out is this the same site or not. So doing a better job of telling us where the sites are and describing the sites, describing the physical properties of sites, the biological properties of the sites really would help us do a much better job in these types of exercises. Now I want to talk a little bit about some of the new challenges that are coming up. We've finished the emissions factors. They're there, they're available to be used but that's only the beginning. Understanding just how much the emissions are is the first step. We need to, now we need to be looking at and the international community and the local communities are interested in looking at what can we do about those emissions? And I've been hearing a lot lately over opportunities for water table management and this water table management idea I hear it talked about in the private sector. April was talking about it at the Asia Forest Summit. APP has been talking about, well we're working with some people in the consulting companies to try and improve our water table management to reduce emissions. People in the NGO sector are talking about water table management and the idea is that if we can raise the water table we can reduce emissions. And I think we've been looking at the data and this is what's in the handout here. And just walk very quickly through the handout. I was, there was a little bit of a mix up. I was told at the beginning that I could present slides and then we realized that this format really doesn't lend itself to slides. But if we want to look at these controversies we actually do have to look at a little bit of data and this first graph here shows you a very clear relationship between water table depth and CO2 emissions. And it's these types of graphs that have led to the impression that if we change the water table depth we can reduce emissions. There's two problems with this first graph that I have here. First of all the CO2 on the left hand axis is not peat decomposition CO2. It's total soil respiration. So it's root respiration plus peat respiration. The second problem if you flip the page becomes obvious although the graph didn't print out as neatly as it would have projected. What I did was basically white out the line. And if you look at that data do you see that relationship? I don't. If I had to draw a relationship I would have a very slightly negative axis because there is one point all the way in the middle here that's really high. It would probably tip the line with a negative slope. So the relationship, and this graph was used to say for every 10 centimeters we raise the water table will reduce emissions by 9.8, very precise number, 9.8 tons of CO2 per 10 centimeters that we raise the water table. What it should have said was maybe we'll be able to reduce it by between four and 24. And that the good average is about nine. But the relationship doesn't even hold up there. And this relationship isn't emission it's total loss. The next graph is our IPCC data. And you can see the oil pump we also don't find a relationship between water table depth. Then these are the site by site calculations. We don't see the relationship between water table depth. But for the occasion we actually do see a very slight relationship. The relationship explains 15% of the variation. And all these data come from the same place. They all come from the Kampar Peninsula in Indonesia. So for the oil pumps the site to site variation swamps whatever signal there might be associated with drainage depth. And this is brought home even more clearly in the final graph or the next to final graph which is in a degraded forest on one site on a specific site where the water table goes up and down naturally over the course of the year. And there we see that below about 20 centimeters there's absolutely no effect on total soil respiration. So in order to actually do anything to reduce the soil the amount of carbon coming out of that system we have to bring the water table all the way back to the surface. Not a condition that most of these companies are talking about when they're talking about growing acacia or oil pumps. And the final graph shows that the rates of subsidence actually change over time. So a constant relationship between water table depth and subsidence and then a constant relationship between subsidence and CO2 emissions over time is probably not a reasonable assumption. So I think that there's a new scientific challenge for us and I think that the next generation of studies we need to actually look at if companies want to begin improving their management what are the management practices that are actually going to change the emissions? So we need everything we have right now is based upon what we call natural experiments. There's no specific manipulation when we isolate a variable. What we do is we compare very different sites with very different drainage levels and sometimes we see a relationship and sometimes we don't. We need to actually get in there and start manipulating water tables in determined ways and figuring out what does that do to the underlying processes. I think we also need to begin looking at nutrient management. Nutrient management is something that's not even being considered but peat has a carbon and nitrogen ratio of 50 to one and so it's very recalcitrant to decomposition. And when you put acacias into these peat lands they fix nitrogen. When you put oil pump in these areas you put nitrogen fertilizer on them. You put phosphorus into them. Understanding how much we can actually achieve but I think that there's an assumption right now and it's being promoted by some people in the private sector some people in the NGO sector and it serves the interests of some of these companies that want to continue and actually sustainably manage on peat lands. The narrative that we can actually do something about it but I think the science is not yet there and I think that's the next challenge for us as scientists is to begin answering some of these questions. If you actually want to manage these peat lands what can you do and what are the limits to what you can do? Thank you very much. Okay, thank you Lou. For this not only tasty but also spicy presentation some controversy coming up. Maybe there are some questions or comments. John. Thanks Lou, great presentation. I remember that the Indonesia Australian program in Central Kalimantan the ambition to restore large areas of the peat land that have been cleared for the right scheme then but they never actually got around to they were planning to block the drainage canals and rewet the peat. Your evidence would suggest that unless you get the water it will right up to the top it's scarcely worthwhile. That's what the data seems to suggest but again there are no data from restoration schemes and so as I said we have lots of natural experiments that suggest that this is the case. I think what we need is to actually isolate some variables on particular sites and validate that. There are other situations where the slope you would draw doesn't necessarily go through the origin and it suggests that perhaps there are even some emissions when the surface is flooded. There's a tremendous of physical reorganization of the peats that happen and if you look at the history if we put nitrogen into these peats we've actually changed the carbon to nitrogen ratios. We may have irreversible changes. It doesn't mean just flooding it and you get the original peat back. That peat has gone from fibric which has, fibric peat is what we call peat that you can see the original structure in. You can see branches, you can see roots to sapric in history which is peat that's much more decomposed. It's physically changed, it's chemically changed and so it's an appropriate assumption to assume that we get the pristine state back if we just put the water back in. It's undergone a change and some things are probably not reversible and we don't know how much the carbon story is reversible or not. Yes Eric? Yeah well obviously as you point out this is a very important topic and there's a lot of interests from a variety of sectors that would be affected. To your knowledge are there other peer reviewed scientific studies that are going on right now or have been completed either by universities or private sector parties, companies themselves or I guess what I'm saying is what is the status of this kind of research other than what C4 is doing? There's an awful lot and actually for the IPCC we reviewed, most of what we reviewed C4 hadn't done. So what was out there two years ago which is when we closed our data, when we closed the publications we were looking at for the data, there was nothing on the restoration. We know that there's some stuff going on right now in the X-Mega Ray scheme, there are some studies that are ongoing but I think we also need to look at independence and some of it is being done by the private sector that has an interest and this is where I think independent publicly funded research has a role to play. Getting scientists who don't have a stake in the outcome saying something because this is where a lot of the credibility is falling away. If you look at the verified carbon standard just put out a whole methodology based upon depth of drainage written by NGOs and private sector companies that actually stand to make some money off of this if they implement carbon trading schemes or carbon emissions reduction schemes. There's a conflict of interest in some of these groups because they're putting forward methods in the verified carbon standard that actually favor their approaches to these things. So I think there's a need for more independent publicly funded publicly executed research on this to parse it and I had some very interesting experiences with the private sector and with the NGO community in this IPCC process and so saying it's not only tigers that maul you when you get involved in tropical peatlands is there's something behind that. Okay, I've been asked to close because we're already running out of time and just a little one more question I think that was over there. Dhamma, yeah, okay. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Louis, for your presentation. I specifically like the ending, you know, there is still a lot to be done. But anyway, my question goes more in the direction that you mentioned the two methods, the subsidence and the flux measurements. And obviously when the IPCC is putting together an emission factor, it cannot judge. If you have peer reviewed literature, it cannot judge if one is better than another. So there needs to be some type of reconciliation. So my question to you is how was the reconciliation because you have two methods very different. So how to put together one single number that represents the emission factor. And my second question is if you eliminate one of the methods, like the subsidence method, for instance, would the result or the emission factor be significantly different than what you have today? Thanks, and I should say that Dhamma actually chaired the committee that and kept the team focused on the task and answering these questions. I think it's very important. I think we have come to a consensus. I think we've done the best we can to reconcile. We produced emissions factors that actually use both of them. And I think your second question, you probably already know the answer. When you take them both away, and this was actually what would really help, you get pretty close to the same answer. You know, it's about three tons difference, but you get three tons lower with the flux based method, then you get with the subsidence method. And then three is certainly within the margin of error of any of the methods. So in the end, it doesn't really matter which method you use, and it shouldn't be a fight between the methods. What it should be is a fight to complete the methods and improve the science over time. And I think everybody was involved in that IPCC process took a really hard look at the methods and understands where they need to be improved. And I think perhaps one of the most useful outcomes of that is that I expect we'll see much more ringers papers in the future. Okay, I'm getting finger signs that magically somehow our time has run backwards, so we have a little bit more time and we'll float here. Yeah, thank you, that was really interesting, Lou. And we went to Riau, as you probably know, last month and you hosted that trip, which is responsible as a single province for 15% of Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions, most of which is from Pete. And then Jakoi, of course, visited the president and symbolically blocked a drain. Riau government has responded by saying they're going to block 1,000 drains. Is this a sensible thing to do? Is it realistic? How much are we gonna save by doing that? I'm just asking these questions because I know this is a political arena and it's tremendously charged with the real life political economy stuff that we live with every day here in Indonesia. But there is this political commitment and now they need help. So how can we help them understand what should be done and how you manage water tables to stop greenhouse gas emissions? I think that the best estimate we have from the science right now is that if you're successful at getting the water table to the surface and reflooding the surface, there's a reasonable probability that you will reduce the emissions. We cannot say that you're gonna get zero emissions but you certainly ought to be reducing the emissions. But here again, we're taking natural experiments and extrapolating them to a specific site. And what we need are measurements on specific sites before and after that quantify just how much. And they're not hard to do. And we could have a reasonably better estimate in a year's time by getting some people out there on the ground a couple of months before these things happen and a couple of months after these happen. And I don't think we need... I think we need a little bit of this more solid evidence to quantify in a couple of different types of circumstances just what can we and can we not achieve? And I think that the nutrient question is something that nobody's looking at at the moment. And what can we do about changing nutrient management? Some of our work with SIRAD suggests that there's very little yield penalty in reducing nitrogen fertilizer earlier in the rotation. But there again, it's one fertilizer trial on one peat soil in one particular site. And so we need to look at these a little bit more robustly and with more robust experimental designs. And we're not talking about a decade to produce the next round of updates as we did with the IPCC. We're actually talking about a couple of years to put these numbers together and provide guidance for large-scale investments that actually need to be achieving real emissions reductions and making sure we're not wasting money by overstating or not losing opportunities by understating what's the impact that we've been able to achieve. So I'd like to thank everybody. I'd like to thank the speaker. Let's give him a good clap of hands.