In the context of the climate crisis, a race is underway to restore some of Europe’s most important wetland landscapes – peatlands (or mires). Wet peat soils store significant amounts of carbon if left undisturbed for long periods, as decaying plant matter is starved of the oxygen needed to fully decompose. Historically, peatlands have often been viewed as desolate, stagnant spaces, leading to their widespread drainage and conversion into productive resources for agriculture, forestry or energy generation. Recent scientific and policy efforts to rewet peatlands as a ‘nature-based’ solution for reducing carbon emissions are therefore far from straightforward, giving rise to significant uncertainties and controversies as they encounter diverse ways of knowing, valuing and living with ‘peatscapes’ on the ground. In this context, the Peatscapes project will draw on field research at lowland peat restoration sites in the UK and Estonia – to undertake the first social science investigation of the knowledge controversies entailed in the reinvention of European peatlands as resources for carbon storage. The project is led by an interdisciplinary team of researchers working at the University of Bristol and the University of Birmingham, and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2023–2026).

Why Peatlands?

Peat forms when plants die in waterlogged conditions, as they cannot fully decompose in the anaerobic conditions underwater. This incompletely decomposed plant matter is peat. The carbon which the plants absorbed over their lives does not oxidise, and so remains trapped within the peat. Over millennia, this makes wet peatlands natural carbon sinks - indeed, the carbon contained within all of the world’s peatlands is double that contained within the world’s forests. However, when these peatlands are drained for agriculture, forestry or peat extraction, this carbon is exposed to the atmosphere and begins to oxidise. This produces significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – around 5% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from peatlands. Peatland restoration in Europe is driven by an urgent need to reduce emissions from these degraded landscapes, often by rewetting them, as a form of climate change mitigation. While there are many studies on the physical and ecological science of peat and peatland restoration, the Peatscapes project studies the rapid reinvention of peatlands for carbon storage from a social science perspective. It interrogates restoration as a thorny social process, which creates conflicts between different knowledges and values, and requires engagement with divergent visions of successful outcomes and healthy peatland futures.

The Peatscapes Project

Using a range of qualitative methods — including walking interviews, photovoice, policy analysis, participant observation, and deliberative workshops — the Peatscapes team will engage closely with scientists, restoration practitioners, stakeholder groups, and local communities to address three key research challenges:

1. What are the implications of carbon-based imperatives of peat restoration for pre-existing uses, knowledges and experiences of peatlands — including as a fuel source, fertile soil for agriculture or forestry, local commons, clean water reservoir, biodiversity haven and palaeoecological archive?

2. How is scientific knowledge about peat restoration and its impacts on carbon emissions created, contested, and rendered translatable across diverse socio-ecological contexts? How does this expertise inform novel strategies for scaling restoration up and extracting economic value from peatscapes, including through carbon trading?

3. How might scientists and authorities better collaborate with diverse knowledge communities and stakeholders to co-produce place-specific visions of what healthy peatscapes of the future should look like and how they should be managed?