Evaluating impacts of national and international peatland policies and projects

Impacts of peatland conservation and restoration—whether in the context of projects for carbon markets, or national and subnational policies to achieve nationally determined contributions—are important to evaluate in countries where conversion and use of peatlands contribute substantially to greenhouse gas emissions. Past and present emissions can be estimated based on emissions factors and observed land use. However, the benefits of peatland projects or policies must be evaluated relative to business-as-usual, requiring forecasting of future or counterfactual peatland conversion and use. To enable objective decision-making, forecasts should avoid overestimation of project or policy benefits and should provide some estimate of uncertainty.

We are developing an ensemble approach to generate aggregate baselines of business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions from peatland conversion and use. Because the peatland community currently lacks a rich literature on predictors of land-use change, we apply a simple pixel-matching approach to produce an ensemble of land use trajectories collectively representing business-as-usual in a jurisdiction or region. Greenhouse gas emissions across all trajectories are averaged to produce an approximation of expected business-as-usual emissions. We believe this approach has the potential to produce better evaluations of the impacts of peatland projects and policies on greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem services, and communities, and invite discussion regarding the role of the peatland research community in generating unbiased baselines.