Only 17% Of Peatlands, Vital To Curbing Climate Change, Are Protected

Peatlands around the globe hold more carbon than all the world’s forests, and yet new research reveals a much lower proportion are protected compared to other ecosystems.

Just 17% of these swampy bogs overlap with existing protected areas, according to a mapping study published Feb. 12 in the journal Conservation Letters. By contrast, protected areas encompass 38% of tropical forests and 42% of mangroves.

Lead author Kemen Austin, the director of science for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s forests and climate change program, said she was surprised to find such a low figure conserved for “one of the most valuable ecosystems.”

Peatlands are scattered widely from the northern latitudes through temperate zones to the equatorial tropics, though they cover just 3% of the world’s land.

But if they were better protected, they could play a major role in helping humanity address both climate change and the global loss of species. Besides being a carbon storehouse, peatlands are home to unique plants and wildlife, with some serving as nurseries for fish and other aquatic life on which people and animals rely.

Today, Earth’s peatlands hold 600 billion metric tons of carbon. To pull that much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, you’d need to plant more than 36 trillion trees and keep them alive for 10 years. As vegetation builds up in these bogs over decades, centuries and millennia and becomes waterlogged, it forms peat — a thick, dense, brown, soil-like mat interwoven with partially decomposed vegetable matter — which locks in carbon and keeps it out of the atmosphere where it could contribute to warming.

But this can only happen if the peat remains wet and undisturbed.

When humans drain away the water, which happens often to turn bogs into farms or pasture, or when people burn peat as fuel or to make room for agriculture, that carbon gets released.

Until now, however, scientists and policymakers haven’t had the full picture of how much of the world’s remaining peatlands benefit from some form of protection.

“What we wanted to do was benchmark where we are right now in terms of peat conservation and sustainable management,” Austin said of this new research.

Mapping threats to the world’s peatlands

To accomplish their goal, the team started with a map developed using machine learning called Peat-ML. They then overlaid a series of other maps to plot out protected area coverage, Indigenous lands and human pressures.

The analyses revealed that only about 25% of peatlands in the tropic and temperate zones, and 11% of boreal peatlands, are protected.

Looking at population densities and other factors compiled by the Human Impact Index, they found that nearly half of tropical and temperate peatlands inside protected areas face medium or high human pressure, increasing the likelihood of their destruction and the urgency for more stringent protections.

“It’s an important message,” said Adam Hastie, a researcher and leader of the carbon and wetlands group at Charles University in the Czech Republic who wasn’t involved in the study. Hastie noted that scientists often still aren’t certain about the precise area of global peatlands, especially in the tropics. His own work has sought a better grasp of where peatlands lie in the Amazon. And the extent of the world’s largest known tropical peatlands in the Congo Basin only came to light in the late 2010s.

To check the accuracy of their conclusions, Austin’s team compared its findings with the global map of peatland coverage. In general, their results held up, she told Mongabay. Still, she said she expects future research to boost science’s understanding of where peatlands lie and the threats they face.

“I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of improvement in the mapping of peatlands at national and even subnational scales, so that countries have that inventory of these ultra-high value ecosystems,” she said.

The new maps also showed that more than 25% of peatlands overlap with Indigenous territories, an area of some 1.1 million square kilometers (about 425,000 square miles), or an area two and a half times the size of California. The authors note that the actual proportion is likely higher because data on Indigenous lands is lacking in parts of the world, such as Canada, a peatland-rich country.

The team also found that 85% of those Indigenous lands don’t have other forms of protection. Mark Harrison, a postdoctoral research fellow in ecology and conservation at the U.K.’s University of Exeter, who wasn’t a part of this research, called this portion of the analysis “a good addition.”

“We know that Indigenous communities are some of the most effective stewards of natural resources and natural environments,” Harrison said.

For example, research has shown that Indigenous people in Peru sustainably harvest the fruit of the aguaje palm (Mauritia flexuosa) that grows within peat swamps.

Austin and her colleagues see a substantial “opportunity” to safeguard peatlands that lie outside formal protected areas by better recognizing Indigenous land rights and supporting sustainable management and other strategies to empower Indigenous communities.

Not all protected areas are equal

Austin also emphasized the importance of the quality of existing peatland protections. “We know [that] protected area designation does not guarantee all the desired environmental and social outcomes,” she said.

A range of factors can influence the success of peatland protection, Austin said, such as whether local communities are effectively engaged in conservation or adequately funded. Studies suggest the majority of protected peatlands lack sufficient people and money to meet preservation goals, she added. Global conservation financing has been dealt a blow recently as a result of the recent unexpected drastic cuts to U.S. foreign aid by the Trump administration.

The case for protection is even more urgent because threats to peatlands appear to be increasing. Tropical peatlands are still in relatively good shape compared to temperate peatlands but face pressing threats.

In the Congo Basin, the peatlands of the Cuvette Centrale have been forming for at least the last 10,000 years and cover an area the size of England across the Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo. But they may also be sitting atop a pool of oil that both nations have expressed interest in extracting — despite an overlap between peatland-containing protected areas and oil blocks offered for lease.

Hastie said the draining of peatlands to produce global commodities like palm oil (underway in Indonesia for decades) could soon threaten peatlands in the Amazon Basin and Congo Basin that have so far been largely spared from conversion to agriculture.

And as humans encroach further on ecosystems including peatlands, scientists anticipate such disruptions will pose a greater risk of the spillover of diseases from animals to humans. The burning of peatlands, often used to clear land for farming, also adversely impacts human health, with one study concluding that peat fires in Indonesia led to cases of severe asthma in 635,000 children and thousands of hospitalizations.

The potential and limits of restoration

The authors call for the restoration of damaged peatlands in addition to protection, but they note that such work has its limits. Draining and drying out peatlands triggers an immediate release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Austin explained. But degraded peatlands continue to be a source of atmospheric carbon for a long time, she said, unlike forests, which lose most of their carbon soon after they’re cut down.

Because peatlands are so carbon-dense, there’s a greater climate-related cost for disturbing them. About 15% of the world’s peatlands have been drained for farming, and as much as another 10% have been degraded. That’s resulted in peatlands — covering just 3% of all land — adding about 15% of the total carbon emitted due to land-use change.

Rewetting peatlands can stem carbon releases, and it’s a valuable approach that governments and conservation groups are taking in some parts of the world. A recent study found that Southeast Asia, which holds perhaps 40% of the world’s tropical peatlands, could reduce its emissions from land use by half through protection of the region’s peatlands and mangroves.

“There’s an enormous benefit of restoring peatlands to prevent all of that carbon from being lost” to the atmosphere, Austin said. But restorations won’t recoup the carbon that gradually accumulated over thousands of years.

“That process of recovery and restoration is difficult and slow,” Harrison said. “That makes the need for protecting peatlands and preventing these disturbances from happening in the first place all the more important because it’s hard to rescue them.”

The effects of fire

Fire is incredibly destructive to peatlands — a critical issue in a warming world where wildfires are on the rise.

The process of peat accumulation can occur at a rate of perhaps a millimeter (about 0.04 inches) a year in the tropics. But fire destroys that accumulation a lot faster.

Ten centimeters (about 4 inches) could burn in a peat fire on the day it starts, Harrison said. “That alone is 100 years or so of peat accumulation that is lost … in that one fire event that could occur within one day.”

And carbon lost from peatlands to the sky due to fire or draining is gone, at least from a climate perspective, the authors write.

“We can stop the drainage. We can raise water tables again,” Austin said. “But we won’t get the carbon back. We can stop the emissions, but we’re not going to reabsorb the same quantity of carbon anywhere near to the timescale relevant for mitigating climate change.”

A critical area of concern for scientists — and one Austin said should prompt further research — is the threat to peatlands that even the best protected areas can’t ward off.

“Peatlands also have the potential to be an enormous climate liability,” she said. Climate change, for example, could push even undisturbed peatlands from being carbon repositories to being carbon sources.

“Area-based conservation isn’t going to solve for planet-wide climate events that disrupt the hydrological system that peatlands rely on. Changes to precipitation [or] increasing droughts, for example, could have a really large effect, particularly in tropical peatlands,” Austin said. In addition, “[The] effects of climate change on permafrost thaw in the boreal region could have enormous implications for peatlands and the carbon stored there.”

Still, the authors point to the massive benefits humanity could gain by actively protecting remaining peatlands and restoring degraded ones. Austin said the density of carbon that peatlands hold, on a relatively small portion of the Earth, suggests these waterlogged landscapes are cost-effective targets for conservation and restoration.

“The return on investment is quite high,” she said. And not just because they help keep the climate from heating up further. Keeping peatlands intact will also benefit wildlife and fish, strengthening food security for human communities. What’s more, their ability to both sponge up freshwater when there’s too much, or store it during droughts, can provide a buffer against the extreme weather linked to climate change.

Agreements for a better future

International promises of protection, if honored, could help conserve peatlands. For example, countries that are signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement pledged to come up with carbon emission reductions known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), though few nations actually met the recent February 2025 deadline. Each country’s NDCs also outline plans for reducing emissions, including efforts to conserve ecosystems that store carbon, including forests and peatlands.

In addition, the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for countries to lay out plans for conservation in national biodiversity strategies and action plans. Policymakers who met at COP16, the U.N.’s biodiversity summit last October in Cali, Colombia, will resume their work Feb. 25-27 in Rome.

These and other expected international commitments make 2025 a critical year in which the conservation of ecosystems vital to staving off further species loss and global warming could come into sharper focus.

Despite the low percentage of global peatlands now protected, there’s still optimism. “What I would hope to see is … countries that are very peat-rich [initiating] effective policies that govern use of peatlands in places … not in protected areas,” Austin said.

Harrison emphasized the unique opportunity peatlands offer for addressing climate change. “If indeed it is the case that only 17% … are protected globally,” he said, “then that is clearly a low-hanging fruit in terms of meeting our goals as an international community for reducing carbon emissions.”

(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay-India. Read the original article here)