How Do We Track Wealth in the World’s Peatlands?


Dear people of 2022,

Our remaining chance of making the world habitable for humanity may be, in part, due to climate scientists. extracting carbon dioxide from the sky.

We’ve started to develop technology that can do this, but using current versions means we’re beyond the “break glass in an emergency” situation. Deploying on any effective scale would incur unimaginable costs and engulf vast expanses of land that are mind-blowing. Even scientific journals that chronicle milestones in this field are filled with messages that carbon dioxide removal should be seen as an absolute last resort after all other methods of ending greenhouse gas emissions have been exhausted.

The best available evidence shows that these measures are becoming increasingly necessary, so on some level we rely on scientific breakthroughs to make them less painful. But how much we should use them is a measure of how much people fail.

“This is a difficult field to be in,” said Professor Burcu Gürkan, who runs a laboratory working at the frontiers of this science at Case Western Reserve University. “I am facing a very difficult problem that no one has yet solved. And if I don’t work, who will? Who will solve the problem?”

The funny thing is, nature is very good at extracting carbon from the air and storing it underground. Among his best tools for this are the long-neglected landscapes we call peatlands. They’re some of the world’s most potent carbon reservoirs, but by letting them dry and burn for decades, we’re releasing nearly two billion tons of carbon into our fast-scorching atmosphere each year. Five percent of our annual greenhouse gas emissions come from the millions of acres of peatland we convert from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

However, degraded peatlands can often recover and regain their carbon absorption power. So the question we face in 2022 is: How many of our peatlands can we revive before we break the glass?

This question brought us to Scotland, where the storage of carbon in peat bogs will soon be at a huge premium. As New York Times reporter David Segal describes in his own article latest featureA billionaire making his fortune in fast fashion’s environmentally damaging industry is restoring many acres of these peatlands. For a limited time, the Scottish government offers a generous subsidy for peatland restoration efforts like this, increasing the chances of landowners profiting from rehabilitating their bogs. Credits can be purchased for all the new tons of carbon stored in these regenerated lands. If they charge a high price, it may suggest that profit motives can be exploited to keep carbon in the ground. But it could also indicate that peatland has become a kind of luxury good for wealthy investors seeking virtuous assets, making land far more expensive for people already living in Scotland.

In some ways, this story is a fun home-mirror version of the situation we reported in February in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where loggers are starting to turn their eyes to the shield forests. world’s largest tropical peat net. Villagers at the forefront of deforestation efforts seek to understand how much the world values ​​peatlands and the communities that protect them.

We know the existence and size of this network, Dr. Simon Lewis, Dr. It is a product of the work of Greta Dargie and her colleagues who described these peatlands and mapped their extent. Dr. While the discovery of this as-yet-pristine ecosystem is a promising sign in many ways, it’s also fueling an industry of consultants, Lewis said. to keep these lands healthy.

Will Scotland’s peatlands become luxury goods even as Congo’s peatlands compete for limited resources? We don’t yet know the answers to these questions, but there are many signs. We want you to help us find them.


We started with Headway, The New York Times’ attempt to explore the world’s challenges through the lens of progress, with a look at how full it is. any definition of progress it could be. Tracking progress means keeping our eyes fixed on milestones on the horizon and watching for often conflicting signs of whether we’re moving towards them or further away.

Earlier this year, we made a call to peatland experts and enthusiasts to help us gain insight into what it means to preserve and restore as much of the world’s peatlands as possible; The responses have helped us build a global network of resources that we lovingly refer to as the Bog Squad. we shared an illustrated guide to the role and function of peat and asked your questions. We got over a thousand. Compiled with the help of Bog Squad answers to some of the most asked questions. And now we have some requests from you.

We want to create a collection of landmarks to watch to help us map this complex challenge over time. You can help in three ways:

  • Help us find signs to keep an eye on. Our report highlights a few indicators worth watching: What will it cost to sequester one tonne of carbon in Scotland in 2023? Or to buy a pack of peat moss from your local hardware store? How much funds committed for peatlands go to local efforts to preserve and restore them? You can keep us in tune with others. If you’re in a part of the world such as Canada, Chile or Indonesia – places with both significant peatlands and places with large gaps in mapping and monitoring their condition – you may be in a unique position to help us catch signs that would otherwise be hard to see. or more worth reporting.

  • Help us interpret these signs. We’ll draw on the insights of our Swamp Team to understand what the signals we’ve collected might mean over time. Do they give hope or worry? Could they have great global significance or limited local impact? Whether you have a unique connection to the peatlands or not, your insight and judgment can help us imagine the repercussions and teach us retrospective lessons.

  • Tell us about yourself. Have you been a peat enthusiast for a long time? Arctic fens expert? Or have you just woken up to the magic of mud? Do you come from an area of ​​the world with many known peatlands or few peatlands? We value a variety of resources, so whatever your connection to this topic, we’d love to know.

Headway’s next few projects will go beyond the world’s peatlands to focus on different kinds of challenges. However, we hope to expand our collective attention over time to relatively slow-moving issues such as the health of our ecosystems by flagging signs that we intend to follow. Thank you once again for your ideas and insights as we pursue this difficult force called progress. We are listening.


The Headway initiative is funded by grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a financial sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a fundraiser of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the choice of topic, focus of the articles, or the editing process and do not review articles before they are published. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.




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