Peatland restoration can provide climate change mitigation over all time-scales: A UK case-study

The Agile Sprint “How can we manage uncertainties in habitat greenhouse gas emissions” recently presented some of their findings at two major conferences, and has just published a pre-print article of their work.

Part of the Sprint has explored how peatland restoration undertaken by The Wildlife Trusts contributes to climate change mitigation. Rewetting degraded peatlands restores their ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but can increase emissions of a strong but short-living greenhouse gas, methane. This has led to concerns that peatland restoration may increase warming in the short-term.

By evaluating the emission changes before and after peatland restoration and exploring their climate impacts over different timescales, the Sprint results reveal that the restoration so far has provided significant emission reductions and contributed to climate change mitigation. A key finding was that peatland restoration is likely to be immediately beneficial, since the increase in methane emissions does not overpower the cooling effect from reduced carbon dioxide emission. Furthermore, if peatlands are maintained in their restored state, they can provide long-term cooling, helping repair the climate.

These results were shared by John Lynch in November at the 2024 Global Land Programme Open Science Meeting, and by Xiao Zhang in December at the 2024 British Ecological Society Annual Meeting, recognising and highlighting the value of peatland restoration for climate change mitigation.

The detailed research has recently been published as a pre-print on bioRxiv. This publication provides strong support for restoring peatlands in the UK and regions with similar habitats, confirming peatlands restoration is an important nature-based solution for achieving UK net-zero and wider climate targets.

The paper was written by Xiao Zhang, Minna Ots and John Lynch working on the Sprint at Oxford, and Eleanor Johnston, Kathryn Brown, Nigel Doar, Sprint stakeholders in The Wildlife Trusts. The peatland restoration data were provided by individual Trusts.

This paper is available online and further information can be found on the Sprint webpage.