Peatlands play a significant role in regulating the Earth’s climate system, storing around 30 % of global soil organic carbon. Carbon release due to peatland drainage and degradation contributes around 4 % to global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. These peatland carbon emissions can be an important component of national GHG budgets.
Recent efforts, such as the EU nature restoration law, aim to restore and rewet drained peatlands to reduce GHG emissions, sequester atmospheric CO2, and improve ecosystem services. Large-scale implementation of restoration and management measures requires accurate accounting of emissions balances, both to assess their effectiveness, and to incorporate them into potential carbon credit and monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) schemes.
There are several challenges associated with accurate accounting of GHG balances in peatlands: 1) lack of higher tier methods, particularly for restoration or alternative management methods such as paludiculture; 2) lack of effective methods for monitoring; 3) accounting for GHG emissions during transition periods after land use change; 4) accounting for trade-offs between CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions at different time scales; 5) emissions and management under future climate scenarios; 6) accounting for land use change related to infrastructure development. In addition, solutions to are still lacking to incorporate possible failure of rewetting projects and the considered time horizons into frameworks for carbon farming.
This session welcomes contributions on peatland systems globally that address aspects of GHG accounting and MRV schemes, including methodological development, field measurements, remote sensing, mapping of organic soils, hydrological, modelling, as well as interdisciplinary studies. Examples of regional and international standards for the voluntary carbon market are appreciated, as well as studies analysing the economic aspects of peatland rewetting.