Wetlands are at the frontline in the climate change fight

by Fred Pearce

No natural ecosystems – not even rainforests – store as much carbon as the world’s peat bogs. Once considered watery wastelands, and widely drained for agriculture, their restoration is now in the frontline of the fight against climate change and therefore the focus of important research.

Saving Europe’s Wetlands: The Key to Carbon Storage

by Fred Pearce

From the Balmoral royal estate in the Scottish highlands to bogs of the Biebrza valley in northeast Poland, and from the frozen peatlands of northern Finland to the Rhine delta in the Netherlands, many of Europe’s degraded wet places are leaking carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on a huge scale. We must call a halt.

A pathway to achieving large scale wetland restoration

Reading the 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) it becomes increasingly clear: the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius cannot be achieved by only reducing carbon levels. Other mitigation methods such as carbon capture and storage are necessary to realistically reach our climate change goals.