Why Dmitry Medvedev should turn his attention to Russia's peat bogs

A commentary by Ed Douglas in the Guardian (UK): What's black, squidgy and exhausting to walk on? The answer is peat, the gunk that gives malt whisky its smoky taste and burns sweetly when it's dried out. Dmitry Medvedev is busy just now, having cut short his holiday to deal with Russia's terrifying forest fires, but when he's done the president should think about his country's peat for a while.

Why? Because alongside dozens of forest fires, there are another 56 peat fires, many of them around Moscow, threatening Russia's most densely populated areas. Thanks to extraction and drainage, peat bogs in central Russia have over recent decades dried out, becoming a tinder-box threatening destruction and appalling air pollution. And while winter rains will douse forests, peat fires can burn underground, all winter long.

Not surprisingly, Russian officials are already looking at ways to make their peat wet again, like the project run successfully by Wetlands International in a national park in Moscow's neighbouring Vladimir region. It's a lot cheaper than sending in the fire brigade.

Fixing Russia's peat bogs will do us all a favour because even when it isn't burning, dried-out peat is a disaster. Clearing, draining and setting fire to peatlands for forestry and agriculture releases more than 3bn tons of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to a gigantic 7% of global emissions from all fossil fuels. There's more carbon locked away in the world's bogs and mires than in all the trees put together.

Yet somehow peat remains the global environment's Cinderella. It hasn't caught the public's imagination in the same way rainforests have. In some countries with peat bogs there isn't even a word for the stuff. This has got to change….

The Russian peat fire smoke visible to NASA's satellites