PeatEU

Peatlands are hidden champions in the face of climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. Despite only covering 3% of the earth’s surface, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all forests combined. Healthy peatlands provide invaluable ecosystem services to societies and economies (e.g. climate regulation, flood prevention, drinking water provision, rich biodiversity).

Across the EU, climate and agricultural policies have historically ignored these values, leading to extensive drainage and degradation of peatlands. To date, more than 50% of Europe’s peatlands are degraded, leading to 230 MT of CO2 emitted per year, equivalent to 135M cars (EGU, ICCT) and the loss of the ecosystem services they provide.

Peatland conservation, restoration and sustainable management must be scaled in the EU to revert this trend. Robust policy frameworks at all levels are currently lacking, and urgently needed. Peatland policy making is however complex: it often involves bringing teams and departments together (e.g. agriculture, nature), bridging knowledge gaps collaboratively (e.g. distribution, status, carbon storage, finance options) and changing current practices often requires ample stakeholder engagement and buy-in-a set of skills and knowledge dispersed across individual good practices.

Peat-EU aims to accelerate the development of robust policy instruments with peatland sustainable management, conservation and restoration at heart. It brings together a multi-level, multi-regional partnership of policy authorities and stakeholders to:
Improve pre-identified policy instruments with clear impact pathways with the latest themes identified as key for future-proof peatland policies (e.g.sustainable finance, evidence-based policy, awareness)
Connect to larger peatland initiatives

This leads to a matrix of policy improvements (i.e.carbon, finance, national, regional), which together with the project’s external network, is the basis for replication and scaling across the EU.