Tropical peatlands are threatened by climate change and land-use changes, but there remain substantial uncertainties about their present and future role in the global carbon cycle due to limited measurements. Here, we present measurements of carbon dioxide and methane emissions between mid-2017 and mid-2020 as well as nitrous oxide emissions between 2019 and 2020 at two contrasting sites at a coastal peatland in Sumatra, Indonesia. We find that greenhouse-gas emissions from intact peatland increased substantially due to an extreme drought caused by a positive Indian Ocean Dipole phase combined with El Niño. The emission in the degraded site was two times greater than that at the intact site. The smaller emission from the intact peatland suggests that protecting the remaining intact tropical peatlands from degradation offers important climate benefits, avoiding greenhouse-gas emissions of 24 ± 5 tCO₂e ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ (average ± standard deviation) at our study site in Indonesia.

热带泥炭地受到气候变化和土地利用变化的威胁，但由于测量有限，它们现在和未来在全球碳循环中的作用仍然存在很大的不确定性。在这里，我们展示了 2017 年年中至 2020 年年中期间二氧化碳和甲烷排放量以及 2019 年至 2020 年期间在印度尼西亚苏门答腊岛沿海泥炭地的两个对比地点的一氧化二氮排放量的测量值。我们发现，由于正印度洋偶极子相位与厄尔尼诺现象相结合造成的极端干旱，完整泥炭地的温室气体排放量大幅增加。退化场地的排放量是完好场地的两倍。₂ e ha ^-1  yr ^-1（平均值±标准差）在我们印度尼西亚的研究地点。