Peatlands

Land Use

Peatlands

Peat covers a few percent of the land and holds twice the carbon of every forest on Earth combined. Its only requirement is to stay wet.

⚡Lightning

The effect is immediate. This stops an emission that is happening right now.

Project Drawdown classifies this as Emergency Brake.

Origins

We understood that bogs preserve bodies long before we understood that they preserve carbon, and it turns out to be the same fact.

In 1950, two brothers cutting peat in a Danish bog found a man lying in the turf, so intact they thought they had stumbled on a recent murder. He had died some two thousand years earlier. The bog had kept his skin, his stubble, the rope around his neck, and the expression on his face. What it had done, chemically, was refuse to let him decay: waterlogged, acidic, starved of oxygen, the peat simply would not permit the microbes that undo organic matter to do their work.

Every culture that lived near peat learned to cut it and burn it. The Irish cut turf for a thousand years. The Scots still use it to smoke barley, which is why an Islay whisky tastes of the ground it came from. What none of them knew is that they were burning an archive. It took until the late twentieth century, and the work of soil scientists rather than archaeologists, for the implication to land: if a bog can hold a man unchanged for two millennia, what else is it holding?

The answer arrived properly in 2018, when Jens Leifeld and Lorenzo Menichetti published an assessment in Nature Communications whose title said the quiet part plainly, describing peatlands as underappreciated in climate strategy. The United Nations Global Peatlands Assessment followed in 2022. Within a few years, an ecosystem that most people could not name had moved to the centre of the climate conversation. It had been sitting there, quietly holding its breath, the entire time.

What it actually is

A peatland is a wound in the carbon cycle that never healed, and that is precisely what makes it valuable.

Where ground stays permanently waterlogged, dead plants cannot fully decompose. In a forest, a fallen leaf rots and returns most of its carbon to the air within a year or two. In a bog, it does not. It accumulates. Then the next year's growth falls on top of it, and the next, and over thousands of years the pile becomes metres deep. What you are standing on, in a peatland, is compressed time: a physical archive of every summer since the ice retreated.

The condition holding all of it in place is water. Drain a bog and you admit oxygen. Decomposition restarts. Carbon that has been locked away since before the pyramids begins venting into the atmosphere, and it keeps venting for decades or centuries, because there is so much of it and it goes so deep. This is why drained peat is such an outsized emitter relative to its small area, and why peat fires are so nearly impossible to put out: they burn downward, through the fuel, and can smoulder underground through an entire winter and reappear in spring.

Scientists have a term for what is stored down there: irrecoverable carbon. It means carbon that took centuries or millennia to accumulate and could not be rebuilt on any timescale that matters to us. You can replant a forest. You cannot replant ten thousand years.

The numbers

The store. Peatlands hold an estimated 600 gigatons of carbon, roughly 2,200 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent. That is about twice the carbon held in all the forest biomass on Earth (Yu et al., 2010; Pan et al., 2024). They do this on 3–4% of the world’s land surface (Xu et al., 2018; UNEP, 2022). No other ecosystem comes close to that ratio of carbon to area.

The bleeding. Peatlands that have already been drained are currently emitting an estimated 1.3–1.9 Gt CO₂-eq every year, excluding fires. That is roughly 2–4% of total global emissions, coming from land that most people have never heard of (Leifeld & Menichetti, 2018; UNEP, 2022). Cumulatively, peat drainage had already released around 80 Gt CO₂-eq by 2015, equivalent to nearly two years of humanity’s total emissions.

The stakes. Leifeld and colleagues projected in 2019 that if drained peatlands are left as they are, their emissions alone could consume between 10% and 41% of the entire remaining carbon budget for holding warming below 1.5–2.0°C. A rounding error of an ecosystem could eat up to two-fifths of the budget.

The price. Project Drawdown’s 2026 assessment puts the net cost of protecting peatland at roughly US$0.25 per ton of CO₂-equivalent avoided. For comparison, engineered carbon removal currently runs in the hundreds of dollars per ton. This is among the cheapest climate action available to the human species.

The speed. Drawdown classifies peatland protection as an Emergency Brake solution: one whose climate benefit arrives quickly rather than accumulating over decades. Most nature-based solutions are slow. This one is not.

The gap. Only about 19% of the world’s peatlands sit inside formal protected areas (UNEP, 2022). If you include peatlands within Indigenous peoples’ lands, the figure rises to around 60% — which tells you something important about who has been quietly protecting them.

Why it matters

Here is the part the carbon accounting misses.

Peatlands hold around a tenth of all the world’s non-glacial fresh water. In Britain and Ireland, they supply drinking water to some 71 million people (Xu et al., 2018). They buffer floods and they buffer droughts, because a bog is essentially a sponge, and a sponge works in both directions. When they burn, people die: one study estimated that Indonesian peat fires contribute to the premature deaths of roughly 33,100 adults and 2,900 infants in a typical year (Hein et al., 2022). This is not an abstraction about the atmosphere. It is a question of whose lungs.

And there is a longer argument, which we think is the true one.

The peat under your boots was laid down by plants that lived and died before anyone alive was born, at a rate of perhaps a millimetre a year. Every centimetre is a decade. Every metre is a millennium. It was accumulating while the pyramids were built, while Rome rose and fell, while your great-great-grandparents were making whatever decisions they made about the land they had. It is, quite literally, an inheritance.

Most people who act on climate are not doing it because of a gigaton figure. They are doing it because of somebody: a grandparent who worked a piece of land, a grandchild who will inherit one. Peat is the ecosystem that makes that intuition physical. It is the closest thing the living world has to a savings account opened by people who never met you, and drained in a decade by people who did not think to ask.

You do not have to believe anything about politics to think that is worth not squandering.

What it actually takes

The technical fix is almost insultingly simple. Block the drainage ditches. Let the water table rise. That is most of it. There is no breakthrough required, no material to invent, no cost curve to wait for. Rewetting a bog is closer to plumbing than to engineering.

The difficulty is entirely human, and it comes in three parts.

The drainage was subsidised. Across northern Europe and Southeast Asia, the ditches that are now bleeding carbon were cut with public money, on the reasoning that a drained bog is productive and a wet one is waste ground. Undoing that means telling farmers and foresters that the improvement their grandparents were paid to make must now be un-made. That is not a scientific argument. It is a political one, and it deserves to be conducted honestly and with compensation, not with contempt.

Somebody lives there. Peatlands are not empty. In the Amazon and the Congo, people fish them. In Indonesia, communities cut and sell purun reed from them. Protection imposed from outside, on people who depend on the land, is both unjust and unstable: it tends to be reversed the moment attention moves elsewhere. The literature is consistent that durable peatland protection requires the people who live there to have a stake in it and a say over it.

Leakage is real. Fence off one bog and the drainage can simply move to the next one. Protection only counts if it reduces the total, which means it has to be paired with policy that removes the incentive to drain in the first place, rather than merely relocating it.

There is also a third way that neither drains nor forbids: paludiculture, farming a peatland while keeping it wet. Reeds, sphagnum, certain crops. It is early, it is not a panacea, and it is the most promising route we have to a peatland that pays its own way without being destroyed to do so.

Where it matters most

The boreal holds the great majority of the world’s remaining undrained peat — an estimated 284 million hectares of it, across Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia. Per hectare, protecting boreal peat avoids less carbon than protecting tropical peat, because cold slows decomposition. But there is so much of it, and so much of it is still intact, that it dominates the global picture. This is the ecosystem of the boreal forest and the Canadian Arctic, and it is a story about not making a mistake rather than about fixing one.

The tropics are where the emergency is. Tropical peat decomposes fast when drained, because warmth accelerates microbes, and it is being drained fast — principally in Southeast Asia, for oil palm and pulpwood. A hectare of protected tropical peatland avoids many times the emissions of a boreal one. This is Sundaland, and it is also the Congo Basin, whose Cuvette Centrale was only recognised in the last decade as the largest tropical peat complex on Earth, holding carbon that nobody knew was there.

Britain and Ireland are the cautionary tale and the proving ground. Their bogs were cut for fuel for centuries and drained for forestry with state money in living memory. The Flow Country of northern Scotland is the largest blanket bog in the world and was nearly destroyed by tax-driven conifer planting in the 1980s. Its slow recovery, along with restoration across the Pennines, the Welsh uplands and Ireland, is the world’s best evidence that rewetting works.

Continental Europe — the North German Plain and the Baltic, and Finland — is where the agricultural drainage question is sharpest, and where paludiculture is being tested most seriously.

How to tell it’s being done well

How do you tell real peatland work from a press release? Four tests.

Is the water table rising? This is the only measurement that ultimately matters. Not trees planted, not hectares designated, not credits issued. If a project cannot tell you what the water table is doing, it is not doing peatland restoration; it is doing peatland public relations.

Does it protect intact peat, not just restore damaged peat? Restoration is visible and photogenic. Protection is invisible: nothing happens, which is the point. Because the carbon in intact peat is irrecoverable, an hour spent protecting is worth more than an hour spent repairing. Good programmes do both and say so.

Do the people who live there have a real stake? Look for community governance, secure tenure, and alternative livelihoods, not just a fence and a sign. Protection without consent is temporary protection.

Is it honest about leakage and permanence? A serious project will tell you what happens if the drainage simply moves next door, and what happens if the legal protection is reversed by the next government. A project that mentions neither has not thought about them.

What you can do

Anyone

  • Buy peat-free compost. Horticultural peat is dug from bogs and sold in bags, and the gardener buying it is usually the last person who would want that.
  • Learn where your water comes from. In much of Britain and Ireland, it comes off a bog.
  • Support the organizations doing the rewetting. It is unglamorous work that photographs badly and matters enormously.

Landowners and farmers

  • Find out whether you hold peat. Many people do and do not know it, because peat is defined by its soil, not its surface.
  • Look into paludiculture: farming wet rather than draining. It is early, but it is the route that does not require choosing between a living and a bog.
  • Block a ditch. Restoration frequently starts with something that small.

Policymakers

  • Stop paying for drainage. Removing a perverse subsidy is cheaper than any programme you could fund to undo its effects.
  • Compensate honestly. The people who drained were told to. Treating them as culprits guarantees resistance and slows everything down.
  • Protect the intact peat first. It is irrecoverable, and it is cheap.

Businesses and investors

  • Get peat out of your supply chain, particularly horticulture and palm oil.
  • If you buy carbon credits, demand water-table data. A peatland credit without hydrology is not a credit; it is a hope.
  • Fund secure land tenure for the communities who already steward peat. It is the highest-leverage money in the field.

Where this matters most

Boreal Forest Scottish Highlands Yorkshire Pennines Finnish Lakeland North German Plain Baltic Irish Coast Countryside Sundaland Rainforest Congo Basin Canadian Arctic Welsh Uplands

Who is working on this

We are researching which organizations in our directory of 8,493 actively work on this solution, and we only list an organization once we have verified it. That research is ongoing. In the meantime, search the directory yourself:

Search the directory for “Peatlands” →

Questions

How can peatlands hold more carbon than all the world's forests?

Because their carbon is not in living plants but in accumulated, undecomposed organic matter beneath the surface, which can be many metres deep and has been building for thousands of years. Estimates put the store at around 600 gigatons of carbon, roughly twice that held in all forest biomass, on just 3-4% of the land surface. Depth, not area, is what makes them extraordinary.

Why does draining peat release so much carbon?

Water is what prevents decomposition. Drain a peatland and oxygen reaches organic matter that has been preserved for millennia. Decomposition restarts and the stored carbon oxidises into the atmosphere, and it keeps doing so for decades or centuries. Drained peatlands currently emit an estimated 1.3 to 1.9 gigatons of CO2-equivalent a year, around 2 to 4% of global emissions.

What does irrecoverable carbon mean?

It is carbon that took centuries to millennia to accumulate and that could not be rebuilt on any timescale relevant to the climate crisis. You can replant a forest in a human lifetime. You cannot rebuild ten thousand years of peat. That is why protecting intact peatland is worth more than restoring damaged peatland, though both matter.

Is peatland restoration expensive?

It is among the cheapest climate action available. Project Drawdown estimates the net cost of peatland protection at roughly US$0.25 per ton of CO2-equivalent avoided, against hundreds of dollars per ton for engineered carbon removal. The main intervention, blocking drainage ditches so the water table rises, is closer to plumbing than to engineering.

How quickly does protecting peatland help?

Quickly. Project Drawdown classifies it as an emergency brake solution, meaning its climate benefit arrives fast rather than accumulating slowly over decades. Most nature-based solutions are gradual. Stopping an ongoing emission is immediate.

How do I tell genuine peatland restoration from greenwashing?

Ask what the water table is doing. It is the only measurement that ultimately matters. A project that cannot tell you is not restoring peatland. Also ask whether it protects intact peat as well as repairing damaged peat, whether the people who live there have a real stake, and whether it is honest about leakage and permanence.

Do peatlands emit methane?

Yes. Intact peatlands release methane, because the waterlogged conditions suit methane-producing microbes. But their carbon uptake outweighs it, so an intact peatland is a net sink. Drainage reduces methane from the peat surface while turning the whole system into a large net source, and the drainage ditches themselves can become potent methane emitters.

Sources

The solution taxonomy follows the framework popularised by Project Drawdown. The analysis above is our own; for their carbon modeling and rankings, visit them directly.