The European Union’s LULUCF Regulation (2018) formalised the role of carbon sinks in EU climate politics, establishing nationally binding targets for the Member States. However, since the adoption of the regulation, LULUCF sinks have significantly declined in countries such as Finland and Estonia, which have heavily relied on their extensive forest reserves in meeting the targets. Consequently, the LULUCF sector has turned from an imagined source of easy reductions to a financial liability, as the failure to meet the sector targets is likely to result in hefty fines for both countries. This has provoked intense debates about the actual state of the forests and the credibility of LULUCF methodologies. These debates have involved a novel attention to the role of forest soils in the overall ecosystem emission dynamics, complicating the hegemonic idea of carbon sequestration by trees as the defining climate attribute of forests. Zooming into these debates, the paper explores how the European politics of land-use emissions is reshaping previous understandings of forests, forest industry, and “national” science in Northern Europe.

Scientific and policy interest in peatland restoration as a “natural climate solution” is rapidly growing, spawning diverse projects that aim to improve carbon storage in peat soils. Our ‘Peatscapes’ research project calls for an urgent social science inquiry into the remaking of peatlands for climate mitigation, approaching peatlands as complex ecosystems whose cultural importance, meaning and economic value has long been contested by different groups. Specifically, in this paper, we propose a social science agenda for the study of a ‘peatscape’ characteristic of Northern Europe: forestry drained peatlands.

Nature restoration is increasingly pursued as a solution to the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss in global environmental discourse. This paper addresses questions of green transitions and ecological repair through exploring contestations around peatland rewetting in Estonia. It focuses on a somewhat overlooked aspect: how restoration involves comparisons and contestations around the value of different ecosystems and their future changes.

In Europe, vast swathes of peatland have historically been drained for agriculture, forestry, or mining, generating significant greenhouse gas emissions. Scientific and policy interest in peat restoration as a “natural climate solution” is therefore growing rapidly, spawning diverse projects that aim either to stabilize carbon already stored in peatlands, or more ambitiously, to reactivate peat-building for carbon sequestration. This paper calls for urgent social science investigation into the remaking of peatlands for climate mitigation

Across Europe, peatlands have nurtured sophisticated and distinctive socio-ecological systems for thousands of years. The process of restoring these unique landscapes—or “peatscapes”—is one that is neither strictly ecological nor exclusively ordered as part of a top-down international response to global warming.

Rewetting of degraded peatlands is increasingly pursued as a solution for net-zero transitions with hopes placed on private capital to rapidly scale-up peat restoration. This paper explores the politics of knowledge inherent in the creation of new peat-based carbon economies in the south of the UK.

This paper problematises the category of carbon removal by exploring carbon accounting in peatland restoration. The ecological diversity of European peatlands and the fragmentary nature of existing data sets, further complicates efforts to ‘scale-up’ peatland restoration as a ‘natural climate solution’. In response to the conference call, the paper examines: 1) how peatland ecosystems intrinsically resist straightforward categorisation as carbon sources or removers; and 2) how the promise of active carbon sequestration is nonetheless mobilised in ecological restoration to create new peat-based carbon economies.

James and Kärg introduced the Peatscapes project at the Peat Café, an online seminar series.

Kärg presented on the Peatscapes project at the 'Ecologies and Infrastructure in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea' conference, jointly-hosted by the UCL Anthropocene and UCL Institute of Advanced Studies in London.

This project undertakes the first social science investigation of knowledge controversies surrounding efforts to “remake” peatlands as a resource for carbon storage at four different peatland restoration sites. It also traces how scientific expertise is integrated into strategies for making restoration economically viable.

James Palmer and his team examine how the restoration of Europe’s diverse ‘peatscapes’ could be scaled up in a manner that successfully reconciles climate benefits with broader social, economic and environmental objectives.