Patagonia is home to some of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet, from thick temperate rainforests and wild steppe to fjord-crinkled coastlines and the great glacier-clad spine of the Andes Mountains that run along its entire length.
These aren’t just beautiful wilderness areas, ripe for exploration by adventurous travellers. A recent study has shown that Chilean Patagonia, and its national parks and protected areas in particular, are one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet. In fact, they store nearly twice as much carbon as the Amazon rainforest. This discovery makes the efforts to protect Patagonia even more pressing and underscores how responsible tourism in the region is a direct investment in the future.
A land of national parks
For a relatively young country, Chile has a lot of national parks. In 1926, it created its very first, Vicente Perez Rosales National Park, in the Los Lagos region of the Chilean Lake District – a beautiful park of temperate rainforest spread out under the picture-perfect cone of Osorno Volcano. Since then, Chile has been on something of a spree, and a hundred years later the country has 101 national parks and reserves, which cover more than 14.7 million hectares of land. In Patagonia, more than 55% of the land is subject to some sort of official protection in this way.
In recent years, Chile has accelerated the creation of national parks, in no small part due to the influence of the philanthropists Doug and Kris Tompkins, the founders of Tompkins Conservation, and the founder of North Face and former CEO of Patagonia respectively. Through their efforts, and organisations like Rewilding Chile, once denuded privately-owned ranching land in Aysen has been rewilded and handed over to the nation to create Patagonia National Park. In the far south near Punta Arenas, similar efforts have seen Cabo Froward set to become Chile’s newest national park (a project we’ve been proud to support through the Swoop Conservation Fund). In total 17 national parks in Chile now make up the Route of the Parks through Patagonia. This trail of protected wilderness stretches for 1,800 miles (2,900 km) from the edge of the Lake District to the very tip of South America, taking in some of the region’s most beautiful attractions from the mountain trails of Torres del Paine and Cerro Castillo to the wilds of the San Rafael glacier and Cape Horn.
At Swoop Patagonia, we know that these are some of the best places to visit on the planet for outdoor adventure, but they’re also playing an important role in keeping the planet’s carbon cycle on track.
What is the carbon cycle?
The carbon cycle is the process by which carbon moves around the planet, between the atmosphere, the sea, the land and the living biosphere. It’s a process we’re all familiar with. Photosynthesis from plants removes carbon dioxide from the air and is stored in living things and the soil and sea. Natural processes like respiration and decomposition release carbon, while industrial processes can disrupt the cycle altogether
Burning fossil fuels does this by releasing carbon that’s been long removed from the cycle and stored away by being turned into oil and coal. But living landscapes also store carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. Our colleagues at Swoop Antarctica are fond of reminding us that the Southern Ocean is one of the greatest carbon sinks in the world, but the example that most people turn to for this is the Amazon rainforest – the green lungs of planet Earth. But the new research by scientists from a network of Chilean universities has shown that while the Amazon is definitely an impressive carbon sink, the landscapes of Patagonia are doing an even better job.
Crunching the numbers
The researchers, who were supported by the Universidad Austral de Chile’s Southern Patagonia Program and the Pew Charitable Trusts, carried out a complete survey of Patagonia’s many ecosystems, looking at data from the forests of Los Lagos and Aysen in the north, and the steppe and grasslands east of the Andes and the peatlands of the far southern coasts of the Magellanes region. They then correlated this with known databases that recorded the amount of carbon that was stored in the different ecosystems, and compared it with mapping data showing protected national and private lands.
By doing this, they were able to calculate exactly how much carbon is being stored in Patagonia’s ecosystems, and how much of that is in protected areas. The results were startling. Across Patagonia, the land is storing 430 tonnes of carbon per hectare. In the national parks and reserves, that number increased to 508 tonnes per hectare.
Astonishingly, that’s nearly twice as much carbon being stored hectare for hectare than in the Amazon rainforest. And although the Amazon region as a whole is larger, Chilean Patagonia stores almost double the amount of carbon. When one of the most potent images for the global environmental movement is of a tropical rainforest being slashed and burned for logging and agriculture, this research is an important reminder that less heralded landscapes are also in vital need of protection.
Protecting Patagonia’s carbon
Anyone who has hiked in the temperate rainforests of Alerce Andino and Pumalín National Parks on the edge of the northern Chilean Fjords knows just how lush their landscapes are. These temperate rainforests are simply dripping with life, from the ferns and mosses that cover the ground to the trees that rise like green cathedrals above these. These landscapes are some of the most important areas for carbon storage in Patagonia. One tree in particular stands out – the Patagonian cypress or Fitzroya cupressoides, better known in Chile as the alerce tree. Alerces are South America’s largest trees and their longest-lived, growing up to 60 metres in height and living for thousands of years. One individual named Gran Abuelo, in nearby Alerce Costero National Park, is a candidate for the oldest tree in the world, at a possible age of nearly 5500 years old).
The study revealed that alerce trees are Patagonia’s single most species for storing carbon in terms of biomass. Early European colonists prized the alerce tree for its tough wood that was ideal for house building, while later ranchers cleared the forests for sheep and cattle. Anyone visiting them today – hiking the trails around them, paying national park fees and supporting guides and the local economy – plays an important role in protecting these important natural assets, not just for Chile but the whole planet.
In the far south, the picture is even starker. Peatlands outstrip even temperate rainforests as carbon sinks, containing as much as 1689 tonnes of carbon per hectare. The move to create Cabo Froward National Park, which is home to one of Chilean Patagonia’s largest undisturbed peatlands looks particularly prescient in light of the new research.
The future
The revelation of the large amount of carbon being stored in Chilean Patagonia comes at a crucial time. Carbon sinks are becoming ever more important to offset greenhouse gas emissions and this research underscores the urgent need to protect the region’s landscapes and their unique biodiversity and ecosystems.
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