Carbon futures in the mire? Knowledge controversies in European peatland restoration and remaking

Abstract

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. Drawing from resource geography, science and technology studies, and environmental history, we contend that peatlands should be understood as “peatscapes” — landscapes characterized not merely by ecological complexity and heterogeneity, but also by long-standing conflicts between different ways of knowing, living, and working with peat itself. To illustrate this new conceptual approach, we investigate knowledge controversies provoked by European peatland restoration on three levels: (1) ontological controversies linked to divergent understandings of the nature and value of peat; (2) metrological controversies hindering emergent peatland restoration science; and (3) resource-making controversies arising from efforts to dovetail restoration with renewed imperatives of economic value generation. We argue that carbon-based agendas do not supersede, but rather selectively rework foundational ideas about peatlands, thus intensifying long-lived controversies about these ephemeral landscapes.

Introduction

Throughout European history, peatlands (or mires) have frequently been regarded as “mostly useless, even dangerous places,” associated with stagnation, waste, and disease (Pungas-Kohv et al. 2015, 242). Characterized by waterlogged soils which gradually accumulate from plants unable to fully decompose, many peatlands were drained in the modern industrial era, either to make way for agriculture and forestry, or to permit the mining of peat as an energy and horticultural resource. In seeking to redeem perceived “‘mistakes’ of nature” (Bruisch 2020, 375), such projects repeatedly rejected alternative ways of knowing and valuing peatlands — whether as vital commons, clean water reservoir, biodiversity haven, or paleoecological archive (Huijbens and Pálsson 2009; Ash 2017; Flint and Jennings 2020). More recently, however, new understandings of the importance of these landscapes — or what we approach as new “resource ontologies” of peat (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014) — have risen to prominence in scientific and policymaking communities concerned with climate change. Within these resource ontologies, peat becomes valued principally for its prodigious capacity, if left unexposed to oxygen, to accumulate carbon and keep it locked up for long periods of time. Following centuries of efforts to “improve” peatlands through drainage, therefore, considerable attention is now being given to the large-scale rewetting and rehabilitation of these fragile ecosystems, in order both to halt greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from drained peat layers exposed to rapid decomposition, and potentially even to enhance their future carbon-binding capacity. In short, peat restoration is emerging as an urgent climate policy priority, being promoted as a vital “nature-based climate solution” for reshaping planetary carbon futures (Griscom et al. 2017; Loisel et al. 2021).

Peatlands cover just 3 percent of the Earth's surface, yet are estimated to store over a quarter of global soil carbon, forming a carbon “sink” more than twice as large as all the world's forests (Turetsky et al. 2015; Gewin 2020). However, emissions from degraded peatlands already total nearly two billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, accounting for ∼5 percent of global anthropogenic GHG emissions (Leifeld and Menichetti 2018). In Europe, owing to long-standing population growth and agricultural expansion, a greater proportion of peatlands has been lost or degraded than in any other continent. Approximately 50 percent of remaining peatland in the European Union (EU) is degraded, covering ∼120,000 km² (Tanneberger et al. 2021a, 6). In Estonia, for example, peatlands once covered 24 percent of the country but have suffered extensive degradation through land amelioration for agriculture and forestry as well as large-scale peat extraction, with less than a third remaining in a near-natural state (Salm et al. 2012; Remm et al. 2019). In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, ∼80 percent of peatlands have been modified (IUCN 2018, 22), with emissions from drained peat exposed to oxidation and erosion estimated to exceed the total carbon absorbed by all the country's forests (Evans et al. 2017; CCC 2020). Crucially however, European peatlands are extremely varied, encompassing vast blanket bogs, patchier, rain-fed raised bogs, and extensive lowland fens and marshes. Partly owing to this ecological heterogeneity, there is in fact no universally accepted definition and categorization of peatlands (Lourenco, Fitchett, and Woodborne 2023).

This paper's key argument is that contemporary carbon-based peat restoration agendas must inevitably adapt not only to the immense ecological complexity and heterogeneity of peatlands, but also to the rich, long-standing, and often conflicting ways of knowing, living, and working with peat, which have shaped human interactions with these landscapes in distinct geographical settings. Indeed, we contend that these landscapes should be understood as “peatscapes,” if we want to grasp the full extent of the challenges involved in the remaking of peatlands as “natural climate solutions” and the rapid scaling up of restoration in Europe, in particular. Advocating the need for sustained social scientific inquiry, the paper draws on ideas from resource geography, science and technology studies, and environmental history, to highlight that all efforts to conceptualize the nature and potential value of peat (whether economically, culturally, or even ecologically) have long been marked by conflicts between competing knowledge frameworks. Emergent efforts to rehabilitate European peatscapes chiefly for climate mitigation, therefore, far from constituting a straightforward “technical fix” (Nightingale et al. 2020), can be better understood as complex, ongoing knowledge controversies.

To demonstrate the need for this new conceptual approach, we investigate knowledge controversies provoked by European peatland restoration on three levels. These relate, in turn, to: ontological controversies around divergent pre-existing understandings of the meaning and value of peat (second and third sections); metrological controversies arising from ambiguities and tensions within an emergent peatland restoration science in the making (fourth section); and finally resource-making controversies surrounding intensified efforts to render restoration itself economically viable or even profitable, including through possible integration of peatlands into carbon markets (fifth section). By attending to these three domains of knowledge controversy in turn, the paper offers a novel interdisciplinary framework for better interrogating the large-scale reconfiguration of peatscapes for climate mitigation against wider socio-economic objectives and contested knowledge claims about “nature.” Beyond asserting the need to appraise peat restoration from beyond the confines of single disciplinary perspectives, however, we also contend that peatlands themselves pose distinct conceptual challenges, owing to their ambiguity, liminality, and “in-between-ness” as “inchoate” and “weird” landscapes at once solid and liquid, living and rotting (Proulx 2022, 84; see also Huijbens and Pálsson 2009; Gruppuso 2022). Closer attention to these features of peatlands, we argue, may elucidate novel questions for environmental geographers, political ecologists, and other scholarly communities interested in exploring evolving relations between nature and capital, especially linked to the extraction of value from non-human life (Battistoni 2017; Krzywoszynska 2020), in the context of accelerating climate and environmental crises.

Static materialities? Ontologies of peat as object–medium

On the surface, burgeoning efforts to rewet and restore Europe's peatlands for carbon storage might be presumed to derive their impetus exclusively from global-scale concerns about climate heating. In practice, the driving logics of restoration (and indeed, ideas about what counts as restoration in practice) are also inevitably shaped by place-specific socio-cultural contexts and environmental histories, scientific and industry practices, as well as broader political-economic processes. Uncovering the full complexity of knowledge controversies around contemporary restoration efforts, therefore, demands a close examination of the synergies and tensions operating between increasingly prominent understandings of peat as a vital repository of carbon on the one hand, and a range of pre-existing ontologies, knowledges, and lived experiences of peatscapes on the other. In this section, we consider ontologies in which peat constitutes a relatively stable and resilient object or medium, with material properties understood as largely fixed, innate, and self-contained. Each of these ontologies has long presented its own unique challenges to even more deeply rooted European colonial depictions — or, perhaps more accurately, misrepresentations — of peatlands, both in Europe and in more far-flung tropical environments, as “‘mistakes’ of nature” (Bruisch 2020, 375) or barren “wastelands” (Goldstein 2016; Manzo, Padfield, and Varkkey 2020; Bresnihan and Brodie 2023b). Accordingly, each has divergent implications for the types of use and forms of value that might ultimately be derived from peatlands, and hence for the scope and ethos of effective (or otherwise desirable) forms of human management and interaction with these landscapes in the future.

Arguably the longest standing of this first set of ontologies is that of peat as a repository of cultivational productivity held in potentia. At its simplest, peat is “the accumulated remains of plant material” (Montanarella, Jones, and Hiederer 2006, 1). It builds up gradually wherever soils are sufficiently waterlogged to suppress the activity of oxygen-dependent organisms which enact decomposition. Undisturbed peat typically comprises around 90 percent water — a wholly inadequate basis for animal grazing or conventional crop cultivation. Once drained however, peat soils ¹ are frequently prized for their productive use in agriculture or silviculture. In European contexts, efforts to achieve the large-scale drainage and so-called “improvement” of many, especially lowland peatlands (along with other wetlands) date back to at least the medieval period, encompassing large coastal regions of the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, as well as interior swamps and marshes in central and eastern Europe and Russia (Rotherham 2020). Described in rose-tinted fashion by Williams (1970) as a “fundamental process… of reclaiming the waste,” such projects were typically associated by their protagonists and sponsors with “progress and civilisational advance” (see also Ruuskanen 2018; Bruisch 2020, 363), and often incorporated directly into narratives of nation-building understood on literal and metaphorical levels. Across Europe today, approximately 125,000 km² of peat soils — an area roughly equal to England — are still used for agricultural production (Page and Baird 2016, 46). This includes many regions deemed critical to food security, especially in central European countries like the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. The idea that peatlands converted into farmland have been “redeemed by being tilled” (Boyce 2020, 189), of course, has often been used to gloss over the violent enclosures and displacements which accompanied large-scale drainage, and not just within Europe's borders. Manzo, Padfield, and Varkkey (2020, 860), for example, discern ongoing legacies of European colonial “improvement” narratives in Indonesian attempts to “rehabilitate” supposedly idle peatlands through conversion into vast oil palm plantations, while Nygren and Lounela (2023) trace the continuing influence in Central Kalimantan of Dutch colonial-era drainage and transmigration projects. Colonizing logics of “improvement” also stand out, however, for their subscription to a physiocratic ontology of peat — that is, of peat soil as a conduit for accelerating wealth production from the land — albeit one that regards peat as needing to be liberated from the waterlogged conditions of its own making to realize this potential.

In contrast to this physiocratic approach, a second pre-existing ontology of peat is predicated not upon the drainage or “reclamation” of land per se, but on the extraction and removal of peat itself. Peat cutting for subsistence household fuel is an ancient practice — cutting tools over 2,000 years old have been recovered from sites in the United Kingdom and Denmark (Rotherham 2009, 9). While today this practice — also known as turf-cutting — is typically associated with specific regions like the Western Isles of Scotland or the Midlands of Ireland (MacDonald 2023; Bresnihan and Brodie 2023b), it was once prevalent in peatscapes across much of northwest Europe, facilitated by the granting of turbary rights to bog dwellers or similar customary arrangements. From the early modern period onward, domestic turf-cutting was joined by more commercial forms of extraction, oriented toward proto-industries such as brewing, salt production, and cloth manufacture (Paulissen et al. 2021; Merrill-Glover 2023). These developments, however, pale into insignificance when set alongside the large-scale, mechanized forms of extraction which took off from the earlier and especially middle parts of the twentieth century. More recently, the impetus for extracting peat for energy has been gradually replaced by demand for peat as a valuable substrate for horticulture, albeit this tends to make use of only upper, less decomposed “white peat” soil layers, leaving deeper layers of “black peat” increasingly redundant as a commodity. In the three Baltic countries, for example, an estimated 900 km² of mires have been directly impacted by industrial peat mining (Karofeld et al. 2017), with significant volumes of peat compost now being exported from this region to markets where extraction for compost production has been banned. From the perspective of this second ontology, peat has been popularized as a lucrative kind of “black gold,” cherished either for its high calorific content as a form of “combustible earth” (Rotherham 2009) or, later on, for its propensity to serve as a potent plant growing medium. Importantly, and in direct contrast to the physiocratic view of peat soil as a repository of agricultural productivity, this second ontology views peat not as the basis for facilitating an “improvement” of land use in situ, but rather as an object needing to be fully alienated from its original environment in order to realize its potential as a mobile, exchangeable commodity.

Separately again, this ontological take on peat as an object–medium is not too dissimilar to scientific efforts to locate historical records — whether of pre-modern human cultures and land management regimes, or of long-term environmental changes — trapped in peat itself. The same anoxic conditions which enable peat to accumulate over time also render peat a highly effective preservative medium. As such, peat embodies far more than a continuous record of the specific plant communities from which it has formed. Indeed, for Fyfe (2022, 17), it constitutes “an archive unlike any other that is available.” Intricate analysis of pollen, charcoal, microfossils, fungal spores, or other proxies trapped in peat can be used to infer historical climate changes or occurrences of fire, shifts in rates of carbon storage in the bog, or varying land management techniques applied over time. In the United Kingdom, Payne et al. (2016) identified nearly 500 paleoecological records based on radiocarbon dating published since 1970, providing insights dating back an average of 4,500 years.

More widely celebrated than peat's ability to serve as a uniquely rich environmental archive, however, is its status as an archaeological “treasure trove.” Perhaps the most striking of these relics are so-called “bog bodies,” of which conservative estimates suggest that around 2,000 have been identified in Europe, preserved — sometimes for several millennia — either in skeletal form or with soft tissue and hair still intact (Giles 2020; van Beek et al. 2023, 122). Beyond human remains, meanwhile, prominent archaeological discoveries have included other important forms of “cultural heritage” (Gearey and Everett 2021) such as ancient tools and wooden trackways, including the Neolithic Sweet Track of the Somerset Levels, thought to have been built almost 6,000 years ago (Brunning et al. 2000), as well as numerous examples in the Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere (van Beek, Maas, and van den Berg 2015).

As other scholars have pointed out, increasingly prominent conceptions of peat as a vital “storage container” for carbon are not new; rather, they echo ontological antecedents found in long-standing understandings of the “value of the bogs-as-storage” (Bresnihan and Brodie 2023a, 374; see also Manzo, Padfield, and Varkkey 2020). Indeed, contemporary carbon-based imperatives of restoration — when focused on curtailing ongoing emissions from the colossal “store” of carbon still locked up in peatlands — share in common with archaeological and paleoecological agendas a twin concern: to enable society to properly recognize the true value of what is contained in peat, and to protect peat itself from disturbance, or worse still, outright destruction. Contrary to other emergent efforts to deliberately modify peatlands so that active carbon sequestration can be reestablished, as discussed below, these storage-based visions ultimately prioritize leaving things just as they already are.

Relational materialities? Ontologies of peat as agent–modifier

While the ontologies outlined above are diverse, their shared conceptualization of peat soil as a relatively stable object or container is not beyond question. In this section, we outline another set of ontologies which are more dynamic in outlook, emphasizing the status of peat as a fragile but active agent or modifier of socio-ecological relations, rather than as a passive object–medium. While these relational ontologies today hold significant influence within scientific (and neoliberal policy) abstractions of peatlands as providers of “ecosystem services,” they also have complex, longer histories. Indeed, from this second suite of vantage points, the properties of peat are not strictly innate and fixed, but can rather be viewed as emergent and co-constituted, arising out of complex, place-specific socio-ecologies, or even — in a more cosmological register — out of “elemental” exchanges between earth, air, water, and fire (Clark 2010; Papadopoulous, Puig de la Bellacasa, and Myers 2021).

The uniqueness of peat's relationship with water, in particular, is hard to overstate. While wetlands and marshlands have often been interpreted as ambiguous zones “in between solidity and fluidity” (Gruppuso 2022), undamaged peat stands out for its complex “dual porosity” — consisting at once of “pores that are open and connected, dead ended or isolated” (Rezanezhad et al. 2016, 75). These two-fold hydraulic properties enable some regions of peatland to lock up prodigious volumes of water, even as others periodically permit water to move freely through, facilitating biogeochemical reactions which shape wider interactions between peat, living vegetation, and the atmosphere. By retaining chemical pollutants and regulating flows of water, healthy peatlands serve to purify water and mitigate the risk of drought and floods, living up to a wider wetland moniker as “kidneys of the landscape” (Acreman et al. 2011; Mitsch et al. 2023, 4).

Shifting from a hydrological perspective to an ecological one, wetlands are often depicted as “nature's supermarkets,” supporting both an “extensive food chain and rich biodiversity” (Mitsch et al. 2023, 4). Peatlands are distinct from other wetlands, however, in respect of the mutual interactions between peat matter, plants, and water. Ultimately it is living organisms, in the form of mire plants growing on the peat's surface, which — in being prevented from fully decomposing by excess water — serve “to create and maintain specific abiotic conditions” upon which other specialist organisms depend (Minayeva, Bragg, and Sirin 2016, 46). Vegetal lifeforms thus do not simply benefit from peat's presence but actively regenerate peat, and peatland ecosystems, over time. Many plants supported by peatlands are highly adapted to wet soils with low oxygen content, low nutrient availability, and higher levels of acidity than surrounding regions. Moreover, peatlands frequently provide valuable habitat for relict plant and animal species displaced from other ecosystems, in addition to serving as havens for breeding and migrating birds (Minayeva, Bragg, and Sirin 2016). These distinctive relationships with water and living organisms are frequently highlighted in scientific accounts of peatlands as providers of vital ecosystem services (Bonn et al. 2014; Tanneberger et al. 2021a). Beyond this neoliberal framing, however, the more fundamental ontology being advanced is of peat itself not as a discrete, stable entity, but the contingent outcome of complex, multi-scalar relationships and processes which are ongoing and inherently fragile.

Beyond the realms of either peatland hydrology, biogeochemistry, or ecology, a further relational ontology focuses on the environmental and health risks associated with peat's vulnerability to fire. While the management of fire risk could be conceived as a regulatory ecosystem service, this perspective also emphasizes finely balanced elemental relationships shaping dynamics of ignition and combustion in peat, especially in the context of drying linked to long-standing irrigation projects and, increasingly, anthropogenic climate change. Peat is renowned for its propensity to facilitate smoldering combustion, a slow, flameless process which is “ignited more readily than flaming combustion” and can persist for long periods, even enduring low temperatures and high moisture levels (Turetsky et al. 2015, 11). Contrary to economic valuations of peat as a combustible fuel store, the vulnerability of peatlands to smoldering and flaming forms of combustion raises concerns because of the potential for large volumes of carbon, potentially including carbon stored for centuries or millennia in deep regions of peat, to be rapidly reintroduced to the atmosphere (Loisel et al. 2021). In addition, fire also poses a significant risk of mobilizing geographically uneven but potentially significant quantities of historic industrial pollutants stored in peat, such as lead, arsenic, or mercury (McCarter et al. 2023).

Finally, a further related set of pre-existing relational ontologies of peat can be found in accounts emphasizing the inextricable role peat occupies in place-specific socio-ecologies and human cultures (Lees et al. 2023). Prioritizing a less scientific and more vernacular set of knowledges — marked by local, embodied, sensory, and emotional accounts — this ontology foregrounds the ways humans live “intimately” with peatlands (Gearey, Church, and Ravenscroft 2020, 57), and through which communities derive a sense of place and belonging, establish spiritual connections with the landscape, or build a wider sense of cultural identity and purpose (Flint and Jennings 2020). In the raised bogs of the Irish Midlands, for example, turf-cutting by hand to fulfill domestic energy needs stands for “a centuries-long agricultural practice,” one still central to local community identities today (O’Connor and Gearey 2020). In the Estonian context, meanwhile, peatlands figure in public imaginaries as a vital commons for activities like berry-picking, recreation, and tourism (Pungas-Kohv et al. 2015). Efforts to raise awareness of the diverse local values of peatlands and balance these against commercial valuations frequently categorize such meanings under the umbrella of “cultural ecosystem services” (Hirons, Comberti, and Dunford 2020; Flood, Mahon, and McDonagh 2021). Nonetheless, the richness of these experiential and symbolic registers exceeds any instrumental logic of service provision. Instead, within these ontologies, peat might be better conceptualized as an active maker of life-worlds (Lassila 2021; Flint 2023).

Just as long-standing ontologies of peat as a stable object–medium, outlined in the previous section, have recently been joined by the idea of peat as a colossal store of carbon, the more dynamic, relational ontologies surveyed in this section resonate with another, separate set of contemporary arguments about the active role peat could play in climate change mitigation. Quite apart from emphasizing the need to leave things as they are, however, these latter ideas hinge on the theoretical possibility that restoration could reactivate and harness the process of peat formation itself. Here, peat-building is promoted as a “natural climate solution” (Griscom et al. 2017) offering “significant future carbon sequestration capacity” (Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering 2018, 29). While there has long been interest in the possibility that flooding linked to climate change could contribute to “regenerating peat” (Heathwaite 1993), this agenda takes matters further, banking on the possibility that deliberate interventions could not only curtail GHG emissions from drained organic soils, but enable peat growth itself to restart or even accelerate, thereby balancing out industrial emissions fluxes. While many scientific assessments remain cautious about the potential for peat-building to be reactivated on anything other than very long timescales (Ellis et al. 2024), these ideas nonetheless dovetail with wider logics of ecological improvement and optimization, seeing non-human nature as a resource available to be “put to work” (Krzywoszynska 2020; Palmer 2021). Moreover, as we discuss later, the promise of not merely avoiding emissions, but creating new carbon sinks, has proven especially attractive to investors in emerging carbon credit markets (Williams, Reay, and Smith 2023). Even so, the idea of peatlands as inherently dynamic and open to modification could also pave the way for alternative, less commodified approaches to restoration, whereby the hallmarks of successful restoration might emerge out of dialogue between experts and local communities, rather than being preordained by logics of productivity (Huff and Brock 2023; Usher 2023).

Thus far, we have sought to show how carbon-based ontologies undergirding contemporary restoration projects — whether conceptualizing peat as a passive carbon store (i.e., as an object–medium), or more ambitiously as a dynamic carbon sink amenable to expansion (i.e., as an agent–modifier) — have not emerged in a vacuum, and do not simply supersede pre-existing ways of knowing peat. Rather, carbon-based approaches draw upon and subtly rework some of the foundational ideas contained in pre-existing ontologies of peat, adding further complexity to already long-lived knowledge controversies about these ephemeral landscapes. Importantly, all of the ontologies we have reviewed should be understood as abstractions which necessarily simplify the lived realities of peatscapes. Nonetheless, these abstractions have proven highly influential in enabling specific expert communities — whether scientific, industrial, or otherwise — to impose order and meaning onto peatlands from the outside. Today, these abstractions are taken up by a wide range of stakeholders, interest groups, and communities seeking to legitimize particular visions of effective peatland management in the context of climate change and net-zero GHG emissions targets. The mobilization of certain depictions of peat's ultimate nature and value, indeed, can be viewed as a form of “ontological politics of resource-making” (Kama 2016, 834), forming a fractious backdrop to efforts to expand carbon-based restoration in practice.

Contested bog metrics: Peat restoration science in the making

Despite calls for large-scale rewetting of peatlands for climate mitigation, peat restoration must inevitably grapple with complex socio-ecological conditions on the ground, and is not a readily scalable “technical fix” (Nightingale et al. 2020). To begin with, rewetting peatlands does not return these ecosystems straightforwardly to “their old selves” (Kreyling et al. 2021; see also Holmgaard 2025); even ecological scientists frequently disagree on the value of extant and historical peatland ecosystems, how they functioned in the past, and how they should be altered in the future (Remm et al. 2019). Far from being a uniform, ready-made science (cf. Latour 1987), restoration experiments arise within particular geographical and historical contexts, involving not only scientists but other diverse actors too, including local landowners, field managers, conservation volunteers, and others. Not unlike the science of peatland reclamation through drainage developed during previous centuries, the emergent science of peatland restoration traverses divergent wetland ecologies and socio-cultural contexts, hindering “cross-national learning and emulation” (Ruuskanen 2018, 224). Efforts to facilitate knowledge transfer and rapidly scale up restoration internationally are also hampered by geographically varying policy and regulatory frameworks, linked both to climate mitigation and to wider land use and nature protection agendas. The upshot is a distinct, highly uneven geography of peatland restoration science itself (cf. Shapin 1998).

At a fundamental level, what counts as restoration in the first place is rarely self-evident, as is the question of what constitutes successful restoration (Hertog and Turnhout 2018). The current focus on rapid emissions reduction from European peatlands represents only the latest chapter in a longer history of ecological restoration agendas targeting these landscapes, whether for biodiversity and species conservation, water quality protection, or wholesale ecosystem recovery (Zak and McInnes 2022). The diverse valuations of ecological processes (and of non-human nature itself) attached to these versions of restoration are not simply subsumed or displaced by the new carbon agenda, making trade-offs and socio-economic compromises all but inevitable. Even at an overarching policy level, European peatlands today find themselves the object of divergent regulatory agendas aiming not just to meet EU net-zero emissions targets, but also to promote broader “nature restoration” as an ecological resilience and climate adaptation strategy (European Commission 2024). In England, meanwhile, post-Brexit “environmental land management schemes” offer numerous ways for farmers to derive public funding for the sustainable management of peat soils, including increased carbon storage, biodiversity improvements, or enhanced nutrient management. Taken together, these circumstances contribute to a messy picture in which an emergent peat restoration science in-the-making, borrowing Usher's (2023, 1256) terms, tends less toward uniformity than to a more “bottom-up” ethic of “site-based engagement and on-the-ground experimentation.”

Crucially, normative ambiguities around the purpose of restoration cannot be fully disentangled from hands-on questions about how to enact restoration in practice. At the landscape level, the specific interventions required to restore any given peatland ecosystem can be fiercely contested. Andersen et al.'s (2017) review of eighty projects funded since 1993 by the EU “LIFE nature” programme, for example, identifies the removal of trees, whose growth would otherwise extract considerable volumes of water from peat, as the most common restoration approach. Nonetheless, conflicts between forestry and peatland rewetting advocates persist in many regions, perpetuated by the mobilization of competing truth claims and doubts about possible climate mitigation solutions (Goldstein 2016; Rytkönen 2023). In Estonia, for example, where large areas of mire have long played host to forests following drainage and improvement projects undertaken in the Soviet or even pre-Soviet eras, acrimonious debates persist about the ecological and economic trade-offs of retaining so-called “old-drained” forests when compared to rewetting (Paal and Jürjendal 2020). Other commonplace interventions, meanwhile, seek to raise water tables, chiefly by blocking drainage ditches or creating bunds, which retain both surface and sub-surface water (Rochefort et al. 2003). While water tables are widely acknowledged as an overriding driver of peatland GHG emissions (Evans et al. 2021), in practice the effects of drain blocking and damming are often spatially variable and subject to diminishing efficacy over time (Holden et al. 2017). Moreover, they can be deeply contentious in settings where large-scale drainage has historically been critical to managing flood risk and sustaining the economic viability of farming (Häfner and Piorr 2021).

Beyond these techniques, many restoration projects involve efforts to reintroduce mire plants, such as Sphagnum mosses, aiming both to reduce the erosion of bare peat and to re-establish active peat-building. Given the limited availability of desired peatland species in some European regions, these projects often rely on a burgeoning micropropagation industry, driving a growing exchange of patented moss products across borders (Pouliot, Hugron, and Rochefort 2015). While plant matter itself may travel relatively easily, however, the re-establishment of peat-building can prove exceedingly difficult to achieve, let alone replicate across diverse contexts. Trials of moss (re)introductions in extracted peatlands in the Baltic states, for example, have largely failed (Karofeld et al. 2017; Küttim, Küttim, and Pajula 2018), despite drawing on expertise from influential Canadian research in the Bois-de-Bel peatland, a former extraction site in Québec (Rochefort et al. 2003; Quinty, LeBlanc, and Rochefort 2020). Similar challenges, meanwhile, confront protagonists of wet farming, or paludiculture, a restoration approach intended for lowland peatlands historically drained for agriculture (Joosten 1998; see also fifth section).

At any given site, identifying the “right” combination of restoration techniques therefore demands consideration of a myriad of ecological and social concerns. At the very least, restoration experiments must consider the topographical and hydrological characteristics of the peatland in question, the extent and nature of degradation induced by previous uses of these landscapes, and the potential impacts that restoration itself might have on surrounding land use and ownership regimes. No less crucial are normative questions about the desirability of diverse future pathways for peatlands, within which carbon-based imperatives must be traded off against other locally prevailing definitions and valuations of “nature,” including those prioritizing biodiversity and species protection, and extant cultural and economic functions, whether related to agriculture, forestry, or otherwise. Even in strictly ecological terms, determining an optimal restoration strategy demands complex calculations of possible ecosystem changes over long timescales, making it even more difficult to define what constitutes “success,” or to determine how far local experiences can be applied elsewhere (Rochefort and Andersen 2017). Yet, while the science of restoration ecology inevitably emerges from localized, small-scale experiments, the promise of rapidly scaling up nature recovery across European peatlands remains deeply attractive to both scientists and policymakers.

Complicating efforts to scale up restoration still further are the expanding array of scientific approaches for monitoring and reporting outcomes, either directly on the ground or, increasingly, via remote sensing. This additional set of ambiguities might be conceptualized as less normative or practical than explicitly metrological in nature (Cooper 2015), and persists even where definitions of success are limited narrowly to the scale of GHG emissions reductions achieved from restoration. While many metrological claims rely on in situ monitoring of water table levels, using basic instruments like dipwells, more sophisticated ground-based equipment, such as gas flux chambers (Baird et al. 2010) and eddy covariance towers (Helfter et al. 2015; Evans et al. 2016), is increasingly used to make direct observations of emissions themselves. Alternatively again, the age of the peat being eroded from mires over time can be inferred from laboratory isotope analysis of dissolved organic carbon flowing in streams (Dean et al. 2019). Set against these field-based monitoring approaches, however, are a growing array of remote-sensing techniques for estimating carbon fluxes, whether by using proxies linked to changing vegetation cover or ground surface temperatures (Lees et al. 2018), or by studying landscape-level surface motion dynamics — a process sometimes described as “bog breathing” (Bradley et al. 2022). Against this backdrop, European peat restoration experiments are characterized not just by a “high variability in sampling and reporting regimes” and a “lack of standardization in monitoring” (Allan et al. 2024, 9), but also by tensions between competing data regimes, some largely based on conventional field-based ecology, and others predicated upon digital technologies and data platforms (Nost and Goldstein 2022). These tensions, crucially, are not purely epistemic, but closely tied to financial interests (see fifth section), with implications for participation, justice, and inclusiveness in the conduct and ethos of restoration science itself (Turnhout 2024).

Finally, all of these tensions significantly confound efforts to standardize calculative practices of carbon accounting for peatlands today. At the international level, improved carbon storage via peatland rewetting has been recognized by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — under the Kyoto Protocol (and subsequently Paris Agreement) and the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) framework — since the early 2010s (Joosten, Couwenberg, and Von Unger 2016). Nonetheless, there is no self-evidently correct method for translating data derived from quite patchy measurements, concentrated around a limited number of restoration sites with distinct socio-ecological conditions, into official carbon inventories facilitating comparison among all peatland ecosystems globally (IPCC 2013; Lourenco, Fitchett, and Woodborne 2023). An increasingly common standardization tool, applied in other regulatory frameworks addressing GHG emissions from land-use change (Palmer and Owens 2015), is the “emissions factor” (EF). In effect, EFs are default GHG values which can be attributed to different categories of ecosystem as they undergo distinct kinds of interventions, before being inserted into models aiming to project future emissions. Not surprisingly, the metrological processes involved in establishing default EFs for different kinds of peatland, and indeed different restoration approaches, are significantly contested and subject to continual revision (Wilson et al. 2015). There is considerable debate, for instance, about the ability of EFs to adequately represent short-lived but intense emissions of methane, frequently triggered by rewetting itself, and not just longer-term emissions of carbon dioxide or nitrogen oxides (Wilson et al. 2009; Günther et al. 2020). But controversy over these standardization processes is also deeply politicized, not least given the propensity of EFs to overlook local knowledges about the complex root causes of peatland emissions (Cole, Willis, and Bhagwat 2021), even as they significantly determine the contributions peatlands make to official emissions inventories. As we discuss in the next section, these tensions are only magnified by the growing interest being shown in peatland restoration as a potential basis for creating carbon credits (cf. Dunn and Freeman 2011; Robertson, Lave, and Doyle 2023), where standardization techniques are crucial to the development of credible monitoring, reporting, and verification systems.

Carbon finance in the mire? Restoration as resource-making and economization

In order to gain traction, peatland restoration must be rendered convincing not only as a tool for achieving climate mitigation and ecological resilience, but also for generating economic value and even profit, both for landowners and wider stakeholders. Aiming to appeal to industry and local governments — and to attract additional private capital — scientific proponents and policymakers have scrambled to prove that rewetting can be reconciled with pre-existing economic uses of peatlands as resources, notably for agriculture, silviculture, or energy generation (cf. Ehrenstein 2018). Amid limited public funding for rapidly scaled-up implementation and ongoing maintenance of restoration projects, scientific and policy initiatives have also signaled further scope for innovation under the aegis of “green growth,” raising the prospect of new business opportunities attached to various environmental and social “co-benefits,” whether for biodiversity, food and water systems, or even physical health and mental wellbeing. Arguably the most potent drivers of the renewed commodification of Europe's peatscapes, however, are efforts to verify tradable units of carbon to be sold in markets as credits or “offsets” for emissions arising from other sectors. Importantly, these diverse economic expectations do not simply complement restoration agendas, but actively shape the techniques used to implement and monitor restoration on the ground, significantly complicating efforts to achieve scientific standardization and consensus-making around best practice. In this section, we examine a final set of knowledge controversies arising from efforts to dovetail restoration with wider processes of carbon resource-making (Bridge 2011; Kama 2020) — both locally (e.g., wet-farming, renewable energy) and through the creation of carbon credits to be exchanged in national or international markets. We contend that these efforts gradually shift from static depictions of peat as object–medium to instead advance an agent–modifier ontology, wherein peat-related ecosystem processes and services become harnessed and accelerated for capitalist value production.

Across Europe, various efforts to “economize” the peat restoration agenda are evident (Çalışkan and Callon 2009). In lowland agricultural contexts, such ambitions manifest in the form of wet-farming (paludiculture) trials, which seek to identify crops that can be grown on waterlogged organic soils, while limiting the flow of emissions from the ground — for example, reeds for use as bioenergy feedstocks or building materials, bulrushes for the manufacture of insulation and textiles, or even mosses to replace peat compost for horticulture. While such experiments have been undertaken with various crops across diverse sites, they have often been hampered by “technical and political constraints” (Joosten et al. 2015a, 297). Indeed, while paludiculture trials are expanding in the Netherlands, Germany, England, and elsewhere, actual yields of “wet crop” remain patchy at best, with occasional successes proving hard to replicate elsewhere (Ziegler et al. 2021; McKie 2023). Nonetheless, “high-intensity paludiculture” remains a key research focus, involving deliberate, rapid cultivation of carbon-binding plants — such as reed, typha, and sphagnum — rather than relying on more spontaneous plant growth and rewilding (Tanneberger et al. 2021b). To some extent, efforts to derive tangible crop-based commodities from rewetted soils reinforce ontological understandings of peat as a passive repository of potential agricultural productivity, albeit now by embracing waterlogged conditions rather than rejecting them. However, wet-farming experiments are also being augmented across Europe as part of efforts to catalyze so-called “climate smart” forms of agriculture (Wichmann 2018) and indeed explicitly to promote “carbon farming” (Paul et al. 2023), thereby retaining and building soil carbon levels across intensely cultivated regions. At the EU level, such moves are supported by the Nature Restoration Law, which promotes paludiculture for the restoration of agricultural peat soils (European Commission 2024), as well as the forthcoming Carbon Removals Certification Framework (European Commission 2022), which proposes to allocate certificates verifying both soil emissions reductions and additional carbon sequestration achieved through numerous “carbon farming” techniques, including peatland restoration and management (Günther et al. 2024). From a resource-making perspective, carbon farming discourses shift the focus away from marketable crop-based commodities and toward soil carbon levels themselves as a source of economic value. No less significantly, the carbon farming agenda also disrupts established ontologies of peat as a fixed store of carbon, pointing instead toward growing hopes for initiatives like “high-intensity paludiculture” to reactivate and potentially even accelerate the carbon-binding capacity of these landscapes.

Beyond paludiculture, other European peatlands are bearing witness to efforts to combine soil rewetting with green energy production, not just through the growth of biomass feedstocks, but also the installation of solar parks and wind farms. This approach is being popularized especially in historically dominant peat-mining regions where exhausted or abandoned brownfields are abundant, such as Ireland, Finland, and the Baltic states. As with intensive wet-farming, these schemes seek to bridge across past and future resource-making endeavors, as peat-mining fields are repurposed alongside other industrial wastelands for large-scale redevelopment by purportedly green industrial actors. Despite opening restoration up for private capital, however, these projects perpetuate the same logics of improvement and productivity as earlier interventions into peatlands, based around agriculture or mining, paying little heed to extant local livelihoods or alternative resource ontologies (Bresnihan and Brodie 2023a). As Bresnihan and Brodie (2023b, 189) put it, the reinvention of peatlands as “wastelands,” including now in their post-mining exhausted state, reveals “a continuation of the extractive logics of the past that have not served the majority.” Excluding local communities, large-scale investments in these kinds of sunk capital, often combined with the promise of additional carbon sequestration, thus reinforce the enclosure of peat commons (cf. Griffin 2023). That said, such developments also have potential to resurrect contestation over divergent valuations of nature or to reinvigorate calls for more socially inclusive ways of managing these landscapes, thus exposing them to a “moving field of other controversies” (Barry 2012, 330). To give just one example, the placement of wind turbines on restoration sites — arguably fatal for the birds attracted to the newly formed wetlands — can be objected to by ornithologists and other environmental groups (IUCN 2023), potentially galvanizing new forms of resistance to the terms on which restoration is enacted in practice.

On a more financialized level still, many of Europe's peatscapes are also playing host to economization efforts centered around the creation of markets in environmental credits, whether tethered to soil carbon emissions reductions, or the provision of wider ecosystem services and natural capital (Dempsey and Robertson 2012; Robertson, Lave, and Doyle 2023; Usher 2023). Against the backdrop of neoliberal environmental policies, peatland restoration is increasingly framed as an “opportunity for investing” in these markets (Bonn et al. 2014), under the presumption that demand for credits will only grow as diverse private organizations seek to offset some of their own environmental impacts. In the United Kingdom and the northeast of Germany, for example, efforts to establish regional-scale carbon trading schemes linked to peatland restoration already have a decade-long history (Reed et al. 2013; Joosten et al. 2015b), with similar initiatives since emerging in Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland (Chen et al. 2023). In the context of expanding international markets for voluntary carbon offsetting, in particular, some state authorities are formalizing expectations that public funding for peatland restoration should be used to leverage additional private investment, under a “blended finance” model (Moxey et al. 2021). From this perspective, restoration becomes a domain for the production of abstract market commodities with exchange value (rather than tangible commodities with use value), rendering degraded peatlands themselves into potentially lucrative financial assets (Huff and Brock 2023). From the standpoint of local communities and landowners, however, enthusiasm for private investment is often dampened by thorny questions about how such economic benefits would be shared, how (and by whom) the long-term maintenance of restored landscapes will be sustained, and who would ultimately be liable if emissions reductions were to prove more modest than expected, or even be entirely reversed if climate warming continues (Cole, Helmcke, and Jenkins 2023; see also Paul et al. 2023). In Scotland, speculation around possible financial income from carbon credits has already helped drive up the price of holdings containing degraded peatlands, incentivizing purchases by wealthier investors at the expense of more precarious rural communities (Jenkins, Helmcke, and Cole 2024). There are also fears that carbon credit-based valuations could conflict with other valuations of ecosystem services, including established payment schemes for agriculture or biodiversity protection. Perhaps owing to these concerns, EU policy debates have proceeded cautiously around the opportunities of carbon trading and offsetting, notwithstanding the potentially pivotal role afforded to credits in the voluntary implementation of rewetting assumed by the Nature Restoration Law (Hering et al. 2023). Even in the post-Brexit United Kingdom, where government has encouraged landowners to tap into private finance via the IUCN-led Peatland Code as a means of meeting national net-zero targets, uptake of peatland carbon credits has been remarkably slow, and many landowners remain skeptical of offsetting (Moxey et al. 2021).

Crucially, key challenges commonly associated with voluntary carbon markets — including verifying not just the scope of real emissions reductions, but also their permanence and additionality — are accentuated in the peatland context by tensions between the conflicting timescales of peat-building processes on the one hand, and the production and sale of carbon credits on the other. Prominent carbon offsetting arbiters, such as the Science-Based Targets Initiative, prefer to certify credits based on initiatives which actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, rather than simply reduce or avoid emissions from existing natural carbon stores (Keane 2024). Yet, the rewetting of organic soils does little by itself to re-activate peat-building processes, while the immediate reductions in carbon dioxide associated with raised water tables are often canceled out by short-term methane pulses, as noted earlier (Ellis et al. 2024), or even reversed in the absence of ongoing hydrological management. Market demand for carbon credits hinges on the promise of an active, steady, and predictable source of carbon sequestration in the near future, to enable straightforward comparison with industrial emissions streams; in effect a form of “temporal fix” (Robertson, Lave, and Doyle 2023). In peatlands, however, long time periods and very favorable conditions are required for peat-building plants like sphagnum or reed to re-establish, which is by no means a linear process. Faced with these realities, some proponents of peat-based carbon credits are seeking to redefine market rules by disrupting the binary distinction between emissions reductions and removals; and indeed between more static and more dynamic ontologies of peat itself. Some, for instance, argue that peat restoration does not simply avoid, but rather “actively halts” an otherwise ongoing source of emissions (Williams 2024). Others, meanwhile, have called for a focus on the so-called “transitional carbon gains” that might theoretically be achieved by deliberate adjustments to restoration techniques on short-term timescales, by rapidly reintroducing carbon-binding vegetation across large swathes of degraded bog (Evans et al. 2023). These alternative definitions — of peat restoration as a source of “active emissions reductions” or “transitional carbon gains” — can be viewed, we argue, as inventive responses intended to streamline carbon resource-making by circumventing the inherent slowness of the peat-building process and flattening the unpredictable temporalities of associated GHG emissions.

Regardless of the specific arguments mobilized by protagonists of peat-based offsetting, the future promise of active carbon removal via peatlands is already enabling new forms of “accumulation by restoration” (Huff and Brock 2023) and indeed new forms of peatland-led assetization, based on the presumed capacity of organic soils to restore themselves (as a dynamic “agent–modifier”), thereby creating exchange value in relation to industrial emissions generated elsewhere. These speculative promises build on previous forms of improvement, commodification, and enclosure by staging fragile wetland ecologies as stable conduits for profit. The creation of carbon credits therefore sees peatscapes increasingly tied to global circuits of capital, even as they remain grounded in local ecological and economic situations.

Conclusions

This paper has called for urgent critical social science research into the remaking of European peatlands for large-scale restoration and climate mitigation. Drawing on insights from resource geography, science and technology studies, and environmental history, we advocated a need to approach peatlands as “peatscapes” — landscapes characterized not merely by ecological complexity and heterogeneity, but also by long-standing tensions between different ways of knowing, living, and working with peat itself. From this starting point, we argued that the burgeoning restoration agenda provokes three distinct kinds of knowledge controversy about the meaning, value, and future governance of peatscapes. The first set of these controversies pertains to the ambiguous ontological status of peat itself. While prominent understandings of peatlands as a vast carbon store in need of preservation have, we showed, subtly built upon longer standing ontologies of peat as a passive yet potent repository of value, these perspectives can be diverted by alternative, relational ontologies of peat. Indeed, the idea of peat as a more dynamic but fragile agent–modifier — evident in peat's entanglement with various elements and livelihoods — can be seen as antecedents to more ambitious, speculative views of restoration today, as a basis for reactivating carbon sequestration and creating new carbon sinks. Moving beyond the ontological realm, we then offered a critical analysis of knowledge controversies in peatland restoration science in-the-making, showing how efforts to scale up rewetting across diverse socio-ecological contexts are hindered by conflicting definitions of (successful) restoration, contentious approaches to monitoring and reporting on restoration's impacts, and competing regulatory demands for the integration of peatlands into standardized GHG inventory and carbon accounting frameworks. Finally, we showed how these controversies are augmented by divergent efforts to “economize” the restoration agenda itself vis-a-vis extant resource-making endeavors, whether through efforts to derive tangible commodities from wet-farming (potentially aligning with the “carbon farming” agenda), through the appropriation of peatlands as ostensibly vacant sites for renewable energy infrastructures with added carbon sequestration benefits, or in an even more financialized vein, via the production of offset credits for market exchange and speculation.

On one level, we have therefore shown how carbon-led visions of restoration do not resolve, but rather perpetuate historical tensions between ideas of peatlands as either static, passive repositories (dovetailing with contemporary interests in carbon storage and “avoided” GHG emissions), or as more dynamic, active agents (raising the prospect of enhanced carbon sequestration, GHG “removals” and “negative emissions”). We noted that while these ontologies are necessarily abstractions that elide the ecological and lived complexities of peatscapes, they are nevertheless strategically mobilized and reinvented to support diverse agendas by a growing range of actors involved in restoration conflicts. Here, carbon-based imperatives and pressures to rapidly scale up restoration for net-zero targets tend to gloss over alternative conceptions and possible futures. Against a backdrop of limited public funding, the tunnel vision on carbon threatens, we argue, to privilege knowledges which are translatable, scalable, and legible for private finance, rendering them inherently more valuable than knowledges attuned to the locally specific idiosyncrasies of Europe's peatscapes, with consequences for who ultimately gets a say in how restoration is implemented. From a participation and environmental justice perspective, we therefore argue that if restoration is to gain greater social legitimacy, governance frameworks and funding models will need to incentivize slower, more open-ended approaches committed not just to initial rewetting, but also ongoing maintenance and experimental knowledge production with local stakeholders (see also Usher 2023; Bresnihan and Brodie 2023b). Rather than seeking quick results, such approaches would ideally be attentive to the complexity and indeterminate dynamics of peatland ecologies over time, as well as the lived, embodied experiences which shape how peatscapes are being (re)valued by diverse communities on the ground.

On a more conceptual level, as peatlands can be defined by their inherent in-betweenness, ambiguity, and liminality, we suggest that this also opens up novel questions for environmental geographers concerned with nature restoration, “natural climate solutions,” and the entanglement of these agendas with capitalist processes of resource-making and value production. Peatlands pose distinct challenges to dualist categorizations not just between land and water, but also between life and death, and even biological and geological temporalities. Ontologies of peat as an agent–modifier, for example, do not simply recognize peatlands as neither fully solid nor fully liquid, without fixed properties or states, but prompt us to view solidity and fluidity themselves as emergent, relational materialities (Gruppuso 2022; see also Peters and Steinberg 2019; Barry and Gambino 2020). Peat-building itself, meanwhile, relies not just upon the metabolic activity of living organisms, but also upon their death and partial decay, revealing a potential analytical blind-spot in scholarship examining the constitutive role of non-humans in the making of nature-based economies (Battistoni 2017; Welden 2023). Finally, the painstakingly slow and fragile temporalities of peat-building contrast markedly with the more visible and tangible forms of non-human metabolism (especially plant growth) harnessed by other nature-based solutions, generating unique challenges for actors seeking to capitalize upon the promise of future carbon sequestration potential in peatlands. Indeed, “accumulation by restoration” is predicated upon short-term, linear, and predictable timescales, which rubs against (and flattens) the indeterminate biological “deep time” temporalities of peatlands. Such challenges suggest that knowledge controversies arising from carbon-led restoration imperatives hinge as much on the contested abstraction of time itself as upon the representation of complex ecological processes. Altogether, peatscapes call for urgent analytical attention in their own right, rather than being subsumed under existing explanatory frameworks and concepts.