Uncontrolled fires across Indonesia burn large areas of peatland and create vast palls of smoke on an almost annual basis. This has devastating effect on wildlife, human health, the economy and climate. Yet, more than 10 years after the massive fires of 1997-98 grabbed international headlines, the problem is still far from solved.

The feedback between the terrestrial carbon cycle and climate is one of the largest uncertainties in current projections of future climate, with the long-term sensitivity of carbon in peatlands remaining unclear.

Wetlands perform many essential ecosystem services—carbon storage, flood control, maintenance of biodiversity, fish production, and aquifer recharge, among others—services that have increasingly important global consequences. Like biodiversity hotspots and frontier forests, the world’s largest wetlands are now mapped and described by an international team of scientists, highlighting their conservation importance at the global scale. We explore current understanding of some ecosystem services wetlands provide.