Climate & environment
Peat the fourth largest polluter in the world
Agneta Elmegård
Published 2025-02-14 12.34
The world's largely unprotected peatlands are a ticking "carbon dioxide bomb", warn researchers in a new study. Dry peatlands are the fourth largest polluter in the world after China, the USA and India.
Peatlands, which cover only three percent of all land on the Earth's surface, bind more carbon than all the world's forests. But their continued fate could blow up climate goals, The Guardian reports.
Despite being a key carbon sink for keeping greenhouse gases in check, peatlands are “dangerously underprotected”, and the carbon dioxide already being released through drainage is enormous, the study shows. Overall, the carbon stored in peatlands is equivalent to more than half a century of current global emissions. Agriculture and mining drain the peatlands, leading to so much carbon dioxide being released that, if they were a country, they would be the fourth-largest polluter in the world after China, the US and India.
The Study, published in the journal idskriften Conservation Letters, analysed the proportion of peatlands that were within different types of protected areas. While 17 percent were within some form of protected area, only about half of that was considered strictly protected. In the Republic of Congo, almost 90 percent of peatlands were within protected areas, but less than one percent had an established conservation status.
Protected status not always the truth
Protection was even lower than the average of 17 percent in the three countries with the most peatlands: Canada, Russia and Indonesia. The United States and Brazil completed the top five countries, which together contained almost three quarters of all peatlands, and had higher shares in protected areas. However, the researchers warned that protected status on a map does not always mean a correspondingly strong protection on the ground.
The researchers believe that the conservation and restoration of peatlands is crucial to keeping global warming below internationally agreed targets and limiting the damage to lives and livelihoods.
Almost a quarter of peatlands are under severe pressure from human impacts.
However, measures to conserve peatlands are a cost-effective way to address the climate crisis, the study shows, and a quarter of peatlands are located in areas belonging to indigenous peoples, which have been shown to suffer less from environmental degradation and impacts than other areas.
Peatlands, defined as marshes, fens, wetlands and bogs, are wetlands where dead plant material has accumulated and decomposition is slow because the material is saturated with moisture. Draining or exposing peatlands for agriculture, mining or roads and other infrastructure releases carbon into the air, leading to carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.
Few countries have strategies for protecting wetlands
In the UK, which ranked 12th in the world by area of peatland, 41 percent is in protected areas. Along with Indonesia, the UK was one of the few countries to have a comprehensive peatland strategy to support its national climate plans, the researchers said in the study, The Guardian reports. However, around 80 percent of the UK’s bogs were already degraded by drainage, overgrazing and burning.
The researchers say that expanding protected areas is important to protect peatlands, but that the management and funding of existing protected areas need to be improved because many are poorly funded. Environmental regulations that protect land from harmful exploitation would also help, as would improving land rights for indigenous peoples, especially where peatland protection was linked to the sale of carbon credits.
In Sweden, the governmental has a stated priority in restoring wetlands according to a decision in February 2024, where the government allocated 3.7 billion until 2030 to rewet dried-out wetlands.
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