Back in March of 2023, I facilitated an online panel discussion on ‘helicopter science’: what it is, where it commonly arises, and how we might prevent it from happening. The event was hosted jointly by the Conservation Ecology Special Interest Group and Policy Team of the British Ecological Society (BES), after the two groups started to consider how they could better support equitable and inclusive ecological research happening across Majority (Global South) and Minority World (Global North) countries. The international panel (pictured below) kindly gave 90 minutes of their time to discuss this challenging topic. And we barely scratched the surface. If you’d like to read more about what we discussed, the Relational Thinking blog (associated with the journal, People and Nature) has just published our summary piece on the event. I will be co-running a workshop on the theme of equitable international fieldwork at the BES Annual Meeting in December, to provide an opportunity for more discussions, and to motivate action.
Reposting here an article that I wrote recently for the International Peatland Society’s (IPS) Peatlands International (PI) quarterly publication. You can get access to the full publication (after becoming a member), access the back-catalogue for free, and find out who to contact if you want to write for PI here. I post this with thanks to Prof. Sue Page, for commenting on the drafted version, and to Susann Warnecke, for sending me to the FenlandSOIL gathering on behalf of the IPS, and generally for running the IPS ship so fantastically.
If you have ever enjoyed a fresh salad grown on English shores, it is likely to have comprised ingredients harvested from the Fens. A third of the country’s fresh vegetable produce comes from this region; an area of c. 3,900 km2, rich in peat. The Fens, situated across the counties of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, and small parts of Suffolk and Norfolk, comprise lowland agricultural peat soils, the working of which generates some £3 billion each year and employs over 80,000 people. These people and resident communities share this region with 13,000 species of plants and animals, which live within and outside of the agricultural matrix.
Another key characteristic of the Fens is that its use in food production is “an obstacle” to achieving Net Zero by 2050. Centuries of farming in this peat-rich landscape has led to vast, largely unquantified carbon emissions and to extensive wastage of the peat soil. With United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signatory nations now required to measure, report, and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions across different sources in line with their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to mitigating climate change, emissions from farming peat soils need to be addressed.
Cue the formation of FenlandSOIL: a cross-sectoral group tasked with exploring how farming in the Fens can be achieved in a carbon-neutral way. This farmer-led consortium was established in 2021, and now has over 80 members from the farming community, academic institutions, and multiple other public and private sector organisations.
One of the FenlandSOIL associated partnerships is that between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and UK-based supermarket chain, Tesco. The goal of their collaboration, and of the FenlandSOIL consortium, is to answer the billion-dollar question: can we mitigate emissions whilst maintaining food production?
Professor Chris Evans presenting research to try to answer the question of: “Can we mitigate emissions while maintaining food production?”
On 17th and 18th April, 2023, over 200 delegates gathered to explore this question, in the small city of Ely in East Cambridgeshire, perched on an island of hard sandstone within a fenland scape. Over the two days, attendees had a chance to mix with individuals from UK Government agencies, universities (including the key collaborators from the University of Cambridge), the National Farmers Union of England and Wales, Wildlife Trusts, supermarket chains, farm equipment suppliers, and an inspiring mix of others.
Panellists discussing peatland management in the Fens. Note the absence of females amongst the panellists!
Alongside the incoming Scientific Officer, Dr Örjan Berglund, I was fortunate to attend this fascinating, inspiring, and at times frustrating meeting of minds on behalf of the International Peatland Society. After attending the two days of presentations, observing smaller group discussions and conversing with a range of different stakeholders in the conference breaks, I identified some common themes that seemed to emerge in this cross-sectoral space. Here are some of my learnings from the event:
No ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to developing interventions that will reduce emissions whilst enabling the food production to continue across farms in this peat-rich landscape. We need a framework to support the development of local solutions, which are bottom-up….
…and farmer-led. Of course, there is no one size of farmer, with each having a different relationship with the landscape they are farming, but every farmer will have knowledge and experience of that multidimensional space, which must feed heavily into each stage of intervention planning and practice. The depth of knowledge, understanding and passion of farmers attending the meeting was evident. Their voices must be present and centred in policy-facing discussions.
One skill-set farmers are often lacking is that required to carry out effective carbon management, being a relatively new role that the already hyper-skilled individuals are being tasked to take on. One farmer I spoke to was confused as to what the best approach to reducing emissions was for his farm – with his particular production system and land cover – after listening to multiple presentations advertising different emissions outcomes of different interventions for diverse production systems on different farms. An evidence-based approach is needed.
There was a call for that evidence-base to focus on “field-scale trials and innovations”; a continuation of the no ‘one size fits all’ principle. When evidence is often place-specific, incomplete, and associated with many uncertainties, packaging it into useful guidance for farmers is one of the ultimate challenges.
But whatever specificity of interventions are proposed, monitoring the changes in emissions, food production, soil health, species abundance, etc., and reporting those verified changes is essential, i.e., MRV – a feasible and effective Monitoring, Reporting and Verification procedure. We need to have standard, transparent, and feasible ways of assessing whether interventions are going any way to reducing GHG emissions over time, whilst not jeopardizing food production, livelihoods and other emergent properties of these systems.
The somewhat unpredictable elephant in the room – which could undermine even the most well-designed peatland carbon management plans – is climate change. This is seen as a large risk to food production and to climate change mitigation interventions. We need to understand more about how future climatic drying and erratic weather patterns may influence peatland ecosystem health, in order that current and near-future investments in restoring wasted peats are not themselves wasted.
The best way of climate-proofing any peatland is to manage the water table. There were plenty of discussions on storage, sharing, and managing risks associated with water across the Fens. From being a resource in abundant supply in this wetland-scape in the past, the lack of water resulting from hundreds of years of drainage is now a significant risk. Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs) are now the institutions who wield the power in these agricultural landscapes; they are in charge of decisions that can determine the economic and literal productivity of farms through water abstraction licencing. Although with transformative consequences on farming, imminent reform in licencing to reduce the exploitation of river water may create opportunities for peatland restoration. However that reform manifests, a short-term reduction in demand for water is needed across the Fens, alongside long-term local planning of water resource management, where the restoration of rivers to “good ecological status” is set as the achievable goal. As an aside, we were also reminded that water-level management in drains is not the same as water-table management in fields; each process plays a separate, yet interconnected role in peat soil conservation and food production.
The IDBs are, of course, not acting independently but in line with national legal frameworks for water management. When it comes to policies, Government intervention, be it through legislation or financial support, is seen as a double-edged sword. Although it may not be clear how the Government could support a strategy for food production in the Fens and the variety of lowland peatlands across the UK, there were proposals for how top-level support could reduce barriers to farming in these landscapes. There were discussions relating to England’s reformulated agricultural payment schemes, e.g., the post-Brexit Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMs), and how multiples of these could be ‘stacked’ together on one farm to increase the resources available to farmers to manage these complex landscapes. Where do farmers get the equipment, the seed-stocks, and other materials and expertise (in some cases) necessary for restoring their peatlands? Could logistical barriers also be reduced through policy change?
Örjan Berglund presenting his research.
Or ultimately, is the lack of financial support the key challenge? Certainly, comments were made about the current lack of financial models that account for low-emissions farming practices on peatlands. We need a financial vision and framework, to accompany a logistical one.
One of these frameworks is carbon financing, and more specifically, the Peatland Code 2.0. The IUCN UK Peatland Programme has worked to revise this standardised procedure for valuing the carbon held in peatlands under protection, with areas of the Fens now eligible for financial investment through the voluntary carbon market under this scheme.
Regenerative agriculture is the future, we are told! I would like to believe this. But I am unsure what this is, exactly, and what it might look like in lowland peatland settings. I was reminded of the need to carefully define the terms we are using, lest they become straw men and lose their meaning, and thus power.
Whilst sharing learning and experiences across peatland regions can be valuable, we also need to appreciate the unique nature of the Fens. Lowland peatlands behave differently to those in the uplands; the latter being the subject of the majority of financial calculations and modelling for restoration. Lowland peatlands themselves come in a wide range of shapes and sizes….
Nuance matters. Variability in soil characteristics, water availability, and management practices across space and through time in the Fens need to be accounted for in any planning and practice. For example, the volume of Nitrous oxide emissions resulting from agriculture on peatlands may depend on the crop being cultivated and its in-field management; this detail matters.
The Great Ouse river running out into the Fens surrounding the town of Ely.
To enable continued food production from the UK’s lowland peatlands, whilst mitigating (to some extent) carbon emissions from damaged peat soils, we need action now. We need a framework for local solutions. We need a field-scale, mosaic approach to interventions. We need to connect up communities and sectors across IDBs, and landscapes. And we need to create opportunities for social innovation. The FenlandSOIL gathering made an inspiring start.
Dr Lydia Cole Coordinator of IPS Expert Group Peatlands and Biodiversity, University of St Andrews lesc1@st-andrews.ac.uk
After many years in the planning, we have an exhibition in St Andrews all about peat. It even contains cores of peat extracted from down the road at Bankhead Moss and from across the Atlantic in the Peruvian Amazon. The exhibition is the brain-child/-bog of Katy Roucoux. She’s been working hard, alongside the Wardlaw Museum staff and a bunch of us peat-minded colleagues, for several years, to put together a room of stories about the ecosystems and people associated with the peatlands of Peru and Scotland, with reference to a splattering of other locations. It’s inspiring to see how research can be translated into a variety of interactive media, and how lush-looking walls of greenery can be created from plastic(!) (see image below).
The ‘lush’ green wall….
To accompany the exhibition, there are all sorts of events happening until the close on 7th May. One set of associated events are the Critical Conversations, where a small group of staff and students come together online to chat about a relevant topic. I was asked to chair a set of three conversations associated with the exhibition. Well, one to start with … and then somehow said yes to the set. (I’m not sure what happened to my resolution of saying yes less.)
In the first conversation, held on 20th February 2023, Katy Roucoux, Shona Jenkins and I discussed our thoughts in response to the question: can peat use be sustainable? We didn’t talk about the use of peat as a substrate in which to grow our tomatoes – a hot topic of discussion in UK policy circles at the moment – but focused on peatland use and whether that could be sustainable in the geographies which we are more familiar with: the Peruvian Amazon and Central Congo Basin. The answer is “yes”, but it depends. To find out about the circumstances under which the use of peatlands can be sustainable, have a listen to the podcast!
The second conversation, on 14th March, explored the multifaceted topic of ‘ethical’ fieldwork: what constitutes ethical fieldwork practices and how we might achieve them. Nina Laurie and Euridice Honorio shared their thoughts, developed through many decades of fieldwork in Peru and other locations, working alongside people with different life experiences, opportunities, and aspirations. Dennis del Castillo Torres, the Director of Forest Research at the Research Institute of the Peruvian Amazon (IIAP), also contributed some thoughts in a pre-recorded conversation that we (just about!) slotted into our live chat. It was interesting for me to have this conversation only one night after facilitating a panel discussion on how to avoid ‘helicopter’ science for the British Ecological Society (keep an eye on the Conservation Ecology blog for a summary article on that in the coming months).
The final Critical Conversation in For Peatland’s Sake trilogy, scheduled for 11th April, will ask whether museums can influence behavioural change. Answers on a postcard, please.
Although the two topics of the first and second Critical Conversations are nebulous, with the impossibility of reaching a one-size-fits-all answer, the conversationalists managed to articulate some really important points and provide plenty of food for thought, certainly for me. The gazillion £/€ question underlying all of the conversations is how do we achieve ‘real’ sustainability, and equity, in practice – where behaviours can continue indefinitely between passing generations – and generations of all people, across cultures, societies and social classes. Answering this question involves understanding how peatlands (in this case) function and what they need to be healthy, alongside understanding how we can nurture their good health whilst sharing out the gifts of these ecosystems amongst each member of our communities. Simple?! We’ll keep working on the answer.
Back in July 2022, I was invited to write a blog post for The Green Edge. This online fountain of ‘green’ knowledge was set up in early 2022 by Fraser Harper and Michael Cross, to explore and disseminate information about the skills the next generation* will need in order to navigate the pressing contemporary issues of mitigating and adapting to climate change, whilst simultaneously addressing societal injustices. I have had the pleasure of working with both of the founders of The Green Edge in the past, and am inspired by this new project that they’ve undertaken, with passion and impressive productivity. As well as their blog, they also now have a Podcast. I was grateful for the invitation to join their mission. My instruction from Fraser was to produce a post on a topic relevant to upskilling for ‘sustainable’ futures. I decided that my most useful contribution could be on skills required for effective interdisciplinary research; there’s not a chance we’ll achieve sustainability without working together.
Here’s the link to my post. Please get in touch if you have any comments on it. And if you have knowledge and wisdom to share on skills for green futures, Fraser and Michael would love to hear from you.
I published a paper earlier this month, all about peatlands in tropical latitudes. (Surprising, eh!) It proved an unexpectedly great opportunity to work with a new and interdisciplinary bunch of co-authors….
And I created my first ‘thread‘! It seems to be what one does now to spread the word about new published research. My main incentive for tweeting, however, was to share the ‘personalised’ link I had been sent by the publisher, Elsevier, as corresponding author. Anyone interested can download the paper, for free, for the first 50 days post-publication. After that, the outcome of two years of information gathering by 10 people and many 1,000s of hours of publicly-funded research before that, will only be accessible to people from universities or other institutions that can afford the annual subscription to the journal, Anthropocene. Because this review paper had been unplanned when applications for research and dissemination funding were written, and was completed outside of one single research project, pooling time and resources from multiple people funded by multiple sources, we didn’t have the £2,000+ Article Publishing Charge to publish it via the Gold Open Access route. Instead, we opted for the shady back-alley route: Green Open Access. This means making the peer-reviewed, accepted version of our manuscript (the version accepted after the final review) available on our institutional website (e.g., here). I am certainly pleased that this is an option (after a 12-month embargo, it seems!*), but it does make finding the article an online adventure that time-poor academics and (often) under-resourced practitioners might opt out of. So for now, I apologise for not going for ‘gold’…
A few weeks ago, I was invited by Rach Allan to join her 40 for Tea podcast, showcasing women working on topics that inspire her. She’d remembered conversations we’d had in the past about peat and the importance of soils, and so invited me along to her podcast kingdom to have a chat about these topics over tea. Here is the episode. And below is the introduction Rach wrote to advertise it on LinkedIn…
***
Do you remember I talked about feeling overwhelmed? With the Climate conversation And everything else.
I had started drinking tea To get to a different kind of truth of the matter. Talking to people rather than Be bamboozled by all the digital noise.
I promised to share what I found out, whilst having tea, with incredible humans across the globe. Simple moments.
This season has been with Powerhouse Women. Normal women, Overcoming adversity Who are upto stuff. Warrior women.
Consider it a beginners guide & an experts guide. Why Peatlands are SO important to our survival on this planet. An invitation to listen while making a nice cup of tea.
Learn something new about this incredible planet What we CAN do. There’s some key tools & signposts you can use in the shownotes.
#40fortea is a side hustle. Exploring voices & perspectives on being human in this new decade. Its an evolving journey. Who do you think I should have a cuppa with next?
Today, Althea Davies and I launched a guidebook. Nope, it’s not a guide to our local peatlands. It’s a Guide to Better Science on Interdisciplinary Research, published by the British Ecological Society and available to download for everyone, for free. We were invited to create the guide after running a workshop on tools of the interdisciplinary trade at the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting in 2019. Since then, we’ve been gathering information and contributions from some inspirational researchers, who reflect deeply on how to make interdisciplinary research (more) effective. We’re so grateful for their wise input, and for the guidance offered by Kate Harrison, the BES’ expert in-house Editor. I can’t fault my pretty great co-author either!
You can learn more about why we wrote the guide through our post on People and Nature’s Relational Thinking blog. And if you do read the guide, and find it useful…or lacking, we would love to hear.
After a year’s delay, COP26 has now been, and gone. And the next Conference of the Parties, the 27th gathering of the 197 countries who make the decisions on how to fulfil the goals of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (which they all signed up for), is already being talked about. Next year, each nations’ negotiators, and their support teams, will meet in Egypt to share what they’ve been up to over the last year; what practical actions and/or policy changes and/or plans they’ve made to stick to their ‘promise’ of reducing their country’s greenhouse gas emissions, and by the amount that scientists think is needed in order for the world to stave off dangerous increases in temperature.
Are we not already beyond the dangerous increases stage? I think most scientists would say that the imperative of maintaining temperatures to 1.5°C is already unachievable. And misses the point. Certainly, the details of the agreement of nations made at COP26, to essentially “phase down” rather than “phase out” the use of fossil fuels, will not accelerate our approach to limiting temperature rise to the mythical 1.5°C. But progress was made, I have heard.
Reflecting on the various conversations I’ve had with people much more involved in COP26 than me, and on reports I’ve read from the event, it seems that ‘nature’ and (some of) the voices of (some of) the people who aren’t normally given space at these talks, were considered. Big business is also, necessarily, supporting the development of fora between trading nations and of tools to more accurately monitor supply chains, especially for products coming from countries with vast areas of forests and peatlands, vulnerable to the power of the global commodities trade. The Forest, Agriculture and Commodity Trade (FACT) dialogue is one fora. And Sainsbury’s are one ginormous business having a go at leading the way.
There were numerous individuals attending the Conference who were also leading the way. A great number walked to COP26 from across the UK. One very special guest walked to COP26 from Syria. Little Amal made the journey (with a bit of help!) to tell the “unpalatable truth” about the challenges faced by so many refugees. Michael Morpurgo gives a moving Point of View on the inspiration behind this brave girl. And her presence at COP26 also reminds us of the growing injustice wrought by climate change, in addition to the injustice that has gone into creating it. But I cannot talk with any authority on that subject. On the subject of peat however, I can.
Through my role as the Coordinator of the Expert Group on Peatlands and Biodiversity, of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Peatland Society, I had the opportunity to give a whistle-stop tour of the peatlands of the Peruvian Amazon to the audience convened by the Global Peatlands Initiative. The UN-led Initiative is a multi-stakeholder partnership that aims to coordinate and share information and expertise with the goal of promoting the conservation and sustainable management of the world’s peatlands. I presented the work of the Tropical Wetlands Consortium to the audience of the Peatland Pavilion at COP26, within the Peatland Partnerships in Climate Change Mitigation and Nature Recovery session, organised by the International Peatland Society. Intact peatlands are increasingly being acknowledged as a key natural way of mitigating against (through absorbing carbon) and preventing further increases in (if not drained & transformed) atmospheric CO2. It was evident from the extensive engagement that the Peatland Pavilion achieved (Michele Obama even popped by, apparently!) that peat is becoming acknowledged as one of the “superstars” of nature-based approaches to achieving Nationally Determined Contributions.
I made a podcast! Or rather co-hosted it, and wasn’t responsible for the heavy job of planning or editing it. I just asked questions. And could have gone on asking questions for hours. It was fascinating to hear the new-ish Director of the St Andrews Botanic Gardens, Dr Harry Watkins, talk about his work in urban forestry and landscape architecture, biosecurity and now in transforming what was a “museum” of plants into a maze of resilient and adaptable habitats. After many years of not questioning the benefits vs. increasing costs of the status quo, and its relevance to contemporary society and its challenges, the Botanic Gardens now are. And their response has been controversial amongst their supporters. They are building a sand dune in the middle of the Gardens… It’s all part of the Tangled Bank project, a response to the challenges and changes resulting from ongoing climate change. Any opposition to the project just need to listen to Harry explain the reasons behind it to be convinced of its importance. Why didn’t this change come sooner even?! And will other Botanic Gardens follow suit?
Here’s Harry’s manifesto for change, expertly edited by Dr James Crooks of the Centre for Energy Ethics: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-3ze76-10ea48d. Many thanks to James and the Centre for Energy Ethics team for inviting me to co-host, and generally for all of their support and enthusiasm for my contribution.
After many more hours, and months of work than initially anticipated, our exhibition of Peruvian peatland pics is live. I sketched the article below with colleagues for publicity purposes; this press release adds a few more details. And the exhibition itself is available to everyone everywhere fortunate enough to have an internet connection: https://peatlands.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/. Compiling the exhibition has very much been a team effort, with colleagues Katy Roucoux and Althea Davies. I’ve learnt a huge amount from their invaluable input and feedback on all aspects of this ‘outreach’ project. I hope we’ve created an accessible narrative that will inspire people to look twice at peatlands, temperate and tropical, and to consider what role they play in all of our lives. I’ve also learnt, the hard way, about the need to balance what can be a very diverse portfolio of work in academia, with publications still being the unit of currency and stamp of expertise for the (academic and employment) world. Now to learning how to achieve that balance before it’s too late…
An open peatland ecosystem in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Lydia Cole. To view the caption to accompany this image visit: https://peatlands.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/.
This autumn, a touch of the tropical has come to southeast Scotland. From early August until late October, 2021, the St Andrews Botanic Gardens are hosting a photography exhibition all about Peru’s lowland tropical peatlands. Lydia Cole, Katy Roucoux and Althea Davies, lecturers from the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, in collaboration with the Botanic Gardens and with funding from the British Ecological Society and The Leverhulme Trust, have curated a collection of photographs that take you on a tour of the steaming swamps of the Peruvian Amazon.
The selected photographs were taken by researchers from the Universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh and Leeds, and the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP, Institute for Research on the Peruvian Amazon) across ten years of fieldwork in Peru’s peatlands. The exhibition explores three key themes: ecosystems – highlighting the “ecosystem engineers” responsible for carbon storage; fieldwork – describing experiences of data collection in the swamps; and people – illuminating the communities and activities associated with the peatlands.
In addition to the physical exhibition, a virtual gallery is housing the photographs and captions to provide online access to audiences near and far: www.peatlands.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk. The website is also available in Spanish and will be live beyond when the exhibition closes at the Botanic Gardens at the end of October 2021. When accessibility improves in Peru and COVID-cases stabilise, colleagues from IIAP plan to display a Spanish-language version of the exhibition in a National Reserve in the Amazonian region of Peru.
Peatlands are a distinctive type of ecosystem where the surface vegetation contributes to, and lives on top of, layers of accumulating peat. Peat is made up of leaves, roots and partially decomposed organic matter, which builds up when waterlogged, low-oxygen, low-nutrient conditions prevent decomposer organisms from recycling dead plant remains. Over hundreds to thousands of years, a thick layer of carbon-rich peat accumulates. With climate change a key challenge faced by global society, conserving the carbon stored in peatlands is becoming an international priority for mitigation efforts.
Peatlands make up over 20% of the land area in Scotland. The most common type of peatland is a blanket bog, where layers of peat carpet the bedrock, forming waterlogged, mossy and shrubby landscapes. In the Peruvian Amazon, peatlands look very different as they are generally forested and often flooded; they are the archetypal ‘swamp’. Over 80% of Scotland’s peatlands are thought to be degraded, whilst Peru’s peatlands are mostly still in an intact state.
Indigenous Urarina women harvesting Mauritia flexuosa palm shoots from a peatland palm swamp in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Lydia Cole.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews and other members of the Tropical Wetlands Consortium, are measuring and mapping the distribution of carbon within the Peruvian Amazon peatlands, the biodiversity they contain and their long-term dynamics, to understand how they develop over centuries to thousands of years. Other projects, as many of the photographs highlight, are exploring the value, meaning and cultural importance of the peatlands to the communities who live there. The photographs in the exhibition have been selected to provide an insight into not only these peatland ecosystems and the people who live in and around them, but also the experience of doing research in these carbon-rich environments. You can find out more about the different projects and team members at www.tropicalwetlands.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk.
If you do have a look at the exhibition and it leaves you with questions or comments, the curators would love to hear them. Please email Lydia Cole (lesc1@st-andrews.ac.uk) if you have any feedback.
Make peat, not war 