Prof Heiko Balzter, at the University of Leicesterin the UK, said: “There is a risk we might lose the peatland carbon sink.” He said the heatwaves and droughts being worsened by global heating itself also threatened the viability of peatlands: “That is one more reason to protect them quickly.”.
The researchers said expanding protected areas was important for safeguarding peatlands but that the management and financing of existing protected areas had to improve as many were poorly funded.
Prof Chris Evans, at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, said the study was important: “Peatlands are often overlooked, not helped by the fact that they are typically flat, wet, often inaccessible, not always picturesque and, unlike forests, the gigatonnes of carbon they hold are hiding below the surface.”.
Environmental regulations that protected land from damaging exploitation would also help, as would improving the land rights of Indigenous peoples, especially where peatland protection was being linked to the selling of carbon credits.
However, action to defend peatlands was a cost-effective way of tackling the climate crisis, the researchers said, and a quarter were within Indigenous peoples’ lands, which have been shown to suffer less environmental degradation than elsewhere.
