Peatlands are vital for tackling climate change, yet scientists still haven’t found them all
Push a metal corer into a peatland and you pull up something remarkable: a dark, dense, sponge-like material made of partly decomposed plants. This peat is rich in carbon. In some places, that peat has been building up for thousands of years. Peatlands are the ecosystems where this happens.
Peat is often associated with the bogs of Scotland or Ireland, but peatlands occur on every continent, from the Arctic to the tropics. They can sit beneath open moorland, under swamp forest or in remote floodplains. What links them is water: in wet, oxygen-poor ground, dead plant material does not fully rot away, so carbon accumulates over centuries and millennia.
That makes peatlands globally important. Although they cover only about 3–4% of Earth’s land surface, they store nearly a third of the world’s soil carbon. When they remain intact, they can keep locking away carbon over very long timescales. But when they are drained or converted for agriculture, forestry or development, that stored carbon is exposed to air and released back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide. Thus, peatlands can become major sources of greenhouse gas emissions when degraded. Globally, peatland degradation is estimated to account for around 5–10% of annual human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.
For ecosystems so important to the global carbon cycle, we still know surprisingly little about some basic things.
Read more: How we discovered the world’s largest tropical peatland, deep in the jungles of Congo
One of the biggest questions is simply: where are all the world’s peatlands? That may sound like a question scientists should already have answered. But many peatlands are hard to detect from the surface, difficult to access, or lie beneath dense forest. Large areas of the tropics remain poorly mapped.
What may be the world’s largest tropical peatland complex, in the Congo Basin, was only formally confirmed to science in 2017. That discovery was astonishing not just because of its size, but because it showed that globally important carbon stores can still remain effectively hidden in plain sight.
This uncertainty matters. If countries do not know where their peatlands are, they cannot fully account for them in climate plans, biodiversity strategies or national greenhouse gas inventories. And if we are still refining estimates of peatland extent, we are also still refining estimates of how much carbon they store.
That gap was one reason behind a new study I co-authored. Rather than trying to answer a single peatland question, we asked a broader one: what does the peatland community think science most urgently needs to resolve?
Working with a global network of more than 100 co-authors, my team ran an open survey in 21 languages and received responses from over 450 people across 54 countries. Participants included researchers, policymakers and practitioners. An independent panel then prioritised the responses, producing 50 questions for peatland science over the next decade. What emerged was not just a set of narrow technical questions. It showed a discipline that is changing fast.
Some priorities were surprisingly fundamental. Participants highlighted the need to map peatlands better, especially in poorly surveyed tropical regions (the Congo peatland is an excellent illustration of this point), and to improve estimates of global carbon storage and greenhouse gas emissions. Others focused on how peatlands will respond to climate change: whether drought, fire and warming could push some peatlands past tipping points where they release more carbon than they store.
Restoration was another major concern. There is already broad agreement that conserving intact peatlands and rewetting drained ones are essential for climate and biodiversity goals: at least 30 million hectares of degraded peatland need to be rewetted by 2030 as a first step towards meeting climate change targets. But restoration is not one simple recipe. A damaged upland bog in Britain is different to a drained tropical peat swamp forest in Indonesia or a permafrost peatland in the Arctic. What works in one place may not translate neatly to another.
Peat, power and people
Just as striking was how often people raised questions about communities, livelihoods, power and fairness. Peatlands are not empty landscapes waiting to be fixed.
In many places they are lived in, worked and culturally significant. Participants asked how local and Indigenous knowledge can shape restoration, how wet agriculture “paludiculture” (farming crops on rewetted peatlands or wetlands) and other peatland livelihoods might work in practice, and whether the benefits of carbon finance and conservation will actually reach local communities.
Read more: Your next puffer jacket could be made from bulrushes, as carbon-storing peat farming takes off
So peatland science is no longer just about describing these ecosystems. It is increasingly about decisions: which peatlands are protected, which are restored, how land is used, who bears the costs and who benefits.
Our study has limits. Most respondents were researchers, and some peatland-rich regions and perspectives were less well represented than others. So this is not a final blueprint for what peatland science should look like everywhere. But it does offer a community-informed snapshot of where the biggest gaps now lie.
For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them.
Pulling peat from the ground means touching material that has been building up for millennia. It is a reminder that these landscapes work on timescales much longer than our own. But the decisions that will shape their future are being made now, and they will help decide not only whether peatlands remain a climate buffer or become another source of instability, but also who gets to benefit from their protection and restoration in the future.
Alice Milner did not receive funding for this work, and does not work for, consult or own shares in any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. Many co-authors on the paper on which this article is based are employed by organisations, including government agencies, intergovernmental organisations, non-governmental organisations, and environmental consultancies, whose mandates include peatland research, management, conservation or policy advice. These institutional affiliations are as stated in that paper. This article was written in collaboration with Michelle McKeown (University College Cork, Ireland), Monika Ruwaimana (Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta, Indonesia), Angela Gallego-Sala (University of Exeter, UK) and Julie Loisel (University of Nevada, Reno, USA). We are grateful to Johanna Menges (University of Bremen, Germany) and Thomas Roland (University of Exeter, UK) for their invaluable contributions, and all co-authors from around the world who contributed to PeatQuest as translators, regional contacts, and expert prioritisation panel members, as well as the many people who submitted questions anonymously to the survey and helped distribute it.