By Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Drained peatlands in Finland can become carbon sinks within just 15 years of restoration, suggests a study published in  Restoration Ecology .  The findings  are a stark contrast to another recent publication that suggests the switch from source to sink can take  hundreds of years . Finland will submit a biodiversity restoration plan to the European Commission this September, and what to do about the country’s  5 million hectares  of drained peatland will likely be a hot topic.  Teemu Tahvanainen , the author of the new study and a plant ecologist at the University of Eastern Finland (Itä-Suomen Yliopisto), said the upcoming deadline motivated him to add to the conversation....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/restored-peatlands-could-become-carbon-sinks-within-decades . 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/opinion/climate-warming-peatlands.html By  Daniel Zarin , executive director of forests and climate change at the Wildlife Conservation Society—opinion piece in The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...wetlands make up only 3 percent of the earth’s land area but store  twice as much carbon  as all of the trees on the planet. Yet for all their importance, these landscapes have been largely forgotten in the global effort to address the climate crisis. This oversight has been hugely consequential and looms ever more so. Peatlands are filled with deep accumulations of slowly decomposing plants and other organic material known as peat. They are carbon sinks, absorbing more carbon than they release into the atmosphere, and have been crucial in slowing planetary warming. They also absorb, filter and release rainwater slowly, helping to ease droughts and floods that have increased in severity with changes to the climate. But increasingly, these lan...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/world/europe/ireland-peat-burning-carbon.html By  Ed O’Loughlin , The New York Times.  Excerpt: One in seven Irish households still burn peat for heat. New rules are aimed at discouraging a practice that many consider part of the culture. For centuries, the Irish have used  peat from bogs  to fuel the home fires. Stories of families coming together to bring home “the turf,” as peat is called in Ireland, evoke idyllic memories of a poorer, but simpler, life on the land. But now the Irish government, in the name of fighting climate change, conserving habitat and improving air quality, is moving to restrict the use of peat — and finding that  it is not easy . Ireland has more than half the European Union’s remaining area of a type of peatland known as raised bog, one of the world’s rarest habitats and, scientists say, the most effective land form on earth for sequestering carbon. “The bogs are our Amazon rainforest. They are where...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/world/africa/congo-oil-gas-auction.html By Ruth Maclean  and  Dionne Searcey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: DAKAR, Senegal — The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the largest old-growth rainforests on earth, is auctioning off vast amounts of land in a push to become “the new destination for oil investments,” part of a global shift as the world retreats on fighting climate change in a scramble for fossil fuels. The oil and gas blocks, which will be auctioned in late July, extend into Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary, as well as  tropical peatlands  that  store vast amounts of carbon , keeping it out of the atmosphere and from contributing to global warming. “If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly,” said Irene Wabiwa, who oversees the Congo Basin forest campaign for Greenpeace in ...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peat-carbon-climate-change.html By Sabrina Imbler, The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Although peatlands make up just 3 percent of land on Earth, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined.…

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/climate/peat-climate-change.html Source: By Henry Fountain, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Protecting intact peatlands and restoring degraded ones are crucial steps if the world is to counter climate change, European researchers said Friday. ... without protection and restoration efforts [for peat bogs], some targets for greenhouse gas emissions “would be very difficult or nearly impossible to achieve,” said Alexander Popp, an author of the study, which was published in  Environmental Research Letters . ...Peatlands ...make up only about 3 percent of global land area, but their deep layers of peat are practically treasure chests of carbon, overall containing roughly twice as much as the world’s forests. In pristine bogs, that carbon remains soggy and intact. But when a bog is dried out, for agriculture or other reasons, the carbon starts to oxidize and is released to the atmosphere as planet-warming carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases...

https://eos.org/articles/peatlands-are-drying-out-across-europe Source:    By Michael Allen, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Peatlands are some of the world’s largest reservoirs of soil carbon, but new research finds that in Europe they are drying out, putting them at risk of turning from carbon sinks to carbon sources. These wetlands are vitally important for carbon storage, holding roughly 30% of global soil carbon, despite covering only around 3% of Earth’s surface. It is their saturated surface conditions that make peatlands such effective carbon stores. When peat mosses die, they sink into this wet environment, and the low-oxygen, often acidic conditions prevent microbes that decompose plant litter elsewhere from working effectively. Instead of breaking down, the dead mosses slowly build up, trapping the carbon dioxide that they sucked out of the atmosphere during photosynthesis underground. But a new study suggests that in Europe peatland water tables are falling. In the journal N...