Carbon

Commenting on carbon credits

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I was invited by one of the Features editors at Business Green, “the UK’s leading source of information for the green economy” (Business Green, 2024), to write a response to a piece they’d recently published that claimed (in the title) that “The UK could lead the world on peatland carbon credits”. I accepted the challenge, in part because it would give me an opportunity to learn more about the way the peatland carbon market is currently perceived, and, provide an opportunity for me to clarify and communicate my argument as to why we need to approach this market with caution. Here’s the argument published in Business Green on 28th June 2024.

Careful investment is required to make peatland carbon credits work for the climate

An exciting economic opportunity does not necessarily equate to a feasible ecological one, writes St Andrews University’s Dr Lydia Cole

Up until recently, the UK’s peatlands – found in the murky space between terrestrial habitats and wetlands – only caught the attention of the government when land was sought for agriculture and forestry. Tax incentives in the 1970s and 1980s encouraged the drainage of these landscapes to pave the way for tree planting for timber production. But now, with international commitments under the Paris Agreement to reduce all avoidable sources of carbon emissions, our leaders are obliged to return to the UK’s damaged bogs, which are responsible for five per cent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

There is no question that blocking drains in peatlands is a necessary step towards restoring them to a healthy condition where they can again sink atmospheric carbon and contribute to mitigating global warming. There are, however, questions to answer around how we restore peatlands effectively, and how we pay for that restoration. After years of trial and error across the Northern Hemisphere, we are piecing together protocols, designing equipment and perfecting techniques for patching together peatlands, and expertise continues to grow, not least through Scotland’s publicly-funded Peatland ACTION programme.


Experience, and thus expertise, on how to fund effective peatland restoration is, however, lacking. In a recent article in BusinessGreen, the managing director of Ridge Carbon Capture Betsy Glasgow-Vasey claimed the UK could lead the world on peatland carbon credits. She may be right, but not right now. Here, I outline five areas of concern that need to be addressed if carbon credits from ‘restored’ peatlands are to contribute to our nation’s net zero goals.


Firstly, there is an assumption that the more money we invest in activities that, on paper, provide a clear pathway to climate change mitigation, the more mitigation we achieve. This is a fairassumption, but we all know how often climate-related goals are met in reality. And we all knowhow wicked and multifaceted a challenge mitigating climate change is. Take carbon credits, for example. They are supposed to lead to reduced greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. However, an UK-based individual or company can currently purchase as many carbon credits as they want via the voluntary carbon market – outside of schemes such as SBTi anyway – with no obligation to reduce their own avoidable emissions, or importantly, to have eliminated all of their avoidable emissions. If the limited stock of the UK’s carbon credits – we don’t have infinite land, let alone peatlands – is spent on such ‘greenwashing’ campaigns, we will run out of our capacity to offset the unavoidable emissions, an essential process on our pathway to achieving net zero.


There seems to be an equally prominent assumption that the reason the UK’s peatlands are not being restored at the target rate is a lack of funding. But recent research in Scotland has suggested quite the opposite. The promise of vast payments from private investors for units of carbon that are currently sat idol is stalling the progress of publicly-funded restoration programmes. Owners and managers of peat assets are facing decision paralysis in an information vacuum: selling carbon credits could mean a reasonable revenue for the current generation, but it could also mean they forfeit access to a valuable resource and leave their inheritors with a stranded asset. The stewards of peatland carbon credits need to understand what selling those credits entails, for them now, and for future stewards. Yet they are struggling to access this information.


Much like there is more than one type of peatland – blanket bogs, raised bogs and fens in the UK –there is more than one type of relationship, pattern of use, land ownership regime, etc. that these stewards have with these multi-use, cultural landscapes. A carbon offsetting scheme in the intensive agricultural landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fens will necessarily look very different to one that succeeds in the crofting landscapes of the Outer Hebrides. Commodifying carbon ignores the unavoidable, and important diversity inherent in each ‘credit’, and a one-size-fits-all market, that treats all peatlands and people the same, will fail.


This market will also fail to address the problem it was created to solve – climate change – if it does not differentiate between types of carbon credits. When you block a drain in a damaged peatland, the hope is that it will start to emit less carbon as a waterlogged landscape re-establishes. This intervention will reduce the volume of carbon being emitted from the peatland initially, and lead to avoided emissions if successful, relative to the business as usual state. Overtime, if drain blocking and revegetation is successful, and climatic drying mild, that peatland might remove carbon from the atmosphere. But peatland ‘restoration’ does not necessarily equate to carbon removals or true carbon offsetting. An exciting economic opportunity does not necessarily equate to a feasible ecological one.

The Scottish Government-funded Peatland ACTION program aims to set peatlands on a “road to recovery” – to carbon sequestration in line with Scotland’s Climate Change Plan outcomes. The conditions and outcomes tied to private investments, dictated and verified via the IUCN’s Peatland Code, are necessarily prioritising market resilience above ecological. It is, of course, imperative that credit schemes entail standards that imbue confidence in investors and are paired with a healthy market through which they can flow. However, the origin of any carbon credit is a unit of carbon, and in the case of peatlands, that unit represents a real block of dark, thick, wet peat, set in a healthy ecosystem. These blocks of carbon are fragile, only replaced on millennial timescales, and will not necessarily stay put through a price tag.

A key solution to all of these notable challenges is government regulation. Carbon credits must only be available for purchase by those companies that have eliminated all of their avoidable emissions and are looking to invest – not make profit from – nature-based offsetting opportunities. And we need to be more careful with the descriptors and phrases we use to rally the crowds: “high-integrity” offsets must hold true, and “level-up the peatland industry” – what does that mean? An obligatory carbon market, similar to the UK Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), building on the ‘polluter pays’ principle, needs to have the capacity to support flexible payment models that direct funding to locally-appropriate peatland restoration or responsible management schemes. Learning from the roll-out of the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) in England, or Piloting an Outcomes Based Approach in Scotland (PoBAS) could help to build a more nuanced, more effective approach to peatland restoration that supports rural communities and leads to long-term investment in the landscapes that could make or break our collective future.


Dr Lydia Cole is lecturer at the School of Geography & Sustainable Development at University of St Andrews; chair of the Expert Group: Peatlands and Biodiversity, within the Peatlands and Environment Commission of the International Peatland Society’s Scientific Advisory Board; and Chair of Conservation Ecology Special Interest Group at the British Ecological Society.

Peatlands & private finance: recipe for …?!

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In late summer of 2022, myself and my wonderful frolleague, Dr Conny Helmcke, were awarded funding to work on an interdisciplinary project with the broad remit of exploring how communities in rural Scotland are making decisions about whether, why and how to restore peatlands. I thought Conny’s work on environmental justice-related themes was very cool and wanted to learn from her, so approached her to see if we could work together. A few months later, we were awarded some funds from the University of St Andrews (with thanks!) to hire a research assistant, who could collect data to explore this theme (Conny and me being ‘tied up’ with teaching). We are ever grateful to Ewan Jenkins for doing such a fantastic job of building the relationships and understanding central to the success of this project, and in the depths of a Hebridean winter.

The main output of the project, as outlined below, is a set of online (and print, on request) resources for the crofting communities that we worked with in rural Scotland. We have also published a Correspondence piece in Nature (with an open access draft here) and an article for The Conversation. And back in March of 2024, as a result of submitting evidence to a formal call, I was invited to attend the 12th Meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s Committee on Net Zero, Energy and Transport, as an invited witness to give evidence on the opportunities and impacts of natural capital finance in the Scottish context. The first set of witnesses (principally representing private landowners across Scotland) focused on the importance of private finance (and the importance of derisking private finance using public funds) for nature restoration and the achievement of net zero goals/climate change mitigation; the second set of witnesses (from Community Land Scotland, Scottish Wildlife Trust, and researchers, including me) focused on the current challenges of the focus on private finance for achieving these same goals. Here are some links to: the agenda for the session, our written evidence (Clerk Paper 1 – Annexe C), the recording of the session (starting at 10:48:00) and the Official Report. The experience was as interesting and enlightening (about the/our political process) as it was frustrating.

There are so many questions still to answer around how we can support peatland restoration whilst supporting communities, in the current climate of carbon markets, amongst other uncertainties. I hope this project doesn’t end here.

** 

To give some more information on the project and resources for communities, here is an article that I wrote for the International Peatland Society’s Peatlands International quarterly communication.

Peatland ACTION assisted restoration of peatlands underway in the north of Lewis, Outer Hebrides. (Credit: Lydia Cole)

If you’re a crofter in Scotland, wanting to restore the peatland ecosystems within your communal grazing land, how do you go about it? If you have the opportunity to take advantage of public funds so that restoration costs you nothing, should you take it? Or should you agree to sell the carbon locked up in your newly restored peatland to a company or a broker, to provide you with extra revenue and them with credits to offset their emissions? What are the costs and benefits of different pathways to restoration? And how might you gain, or lose, from peatland restoration itself?

In October of 2023, colleagues and I launched an online set of resources designed to answer these questions for crofting communities living in rural Scotland, to assist them in making decisions about how to navigate peatland restoration. (Crofters are individuals who have tenure or use of a small plot of land, i.e., a croft, traditionally in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where commonly part of their income is obtained from farming that croft and a larger area of communal land to which they have rights to graze animals.) The website housing these resources: Peatland Restoration: A Guide for Crofting Communities, contains a downloadable Executive Summary and extended Booklet outlining some of the key considerations for crofting communities embarking on, or under pressure to engage in peatland restoration activities. Alongside these, we provide responses to common questions that arose during a period of field research carried out in the spring of 2023 in Lewis, Outer Hebrides, in the form of FAQ, as well as a glossary of terms, to facilitate understanding of the unfamiliar words and complex phrasings common in discussions around carbon credits and associated carbon markets. All of these resources (bar the FAQ) are available in English and Gáidhlig (Scots Gaelic), reflecting the languages spoken in the communities they have been designed for.

These crofter-facing guidance materials are the result of a nine-month project funded by the St Andrews Interdisciplinary Research Support scheme, awarded from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The research underpinning the resources was carried out by a team from the University of St Andrews, led by myself and Dr Cornelia Helmcke, with Ewan Jenkins employed as a Research Fellow, and Dr Bobby Macaulay, (coordinator of the Community Landownership Academic Network (CLAN), University of the Highlands and Islands) and Drs Shona Jenkins and Milinda Banarjee (University of St Andrews), as Co-Investigators. At project inception, Cornelia and I engaged various people to understand if our research questions were pertinent and could yield information of use in the development of informed policies on peatland restoration in rural Scotland. Bobby Macaulay provided invaluable feedback on our ideas and contacts for the project, one of which was the Peatland ACTION Officer in Lewis, Ben Inglis-Grant. We thank him for the time and wisdom he shared with us over the full course of the project. Peatland ACTION is the government scheme that funds and provides logistical support for the restoration of peatlands in Scotland. Peatland ACTION is not to be confused with the Peatland Code, a UK Government-backed scheme that acts as a standard against which carbon credits resulting from peatland-based restoration projects can be verified, enabling them then to be sold on the domestic voluntary carbon market. Our project explored the challenges and opportunities associated with the different pathways to restoring peatland ecosystems within crofting communities in rural Scotland, in order to provide insights for what is necessarily a rapidly developing area of policy around natural capital markets and net zero accounting. For an important critique of the carbon market in the context of achieving net zero in the UK, pertinent to the drive for peatland carbon credits, we recommend Andy Wightman’s blog.

The website and associated resources are being disseminated to crofting communities and organisations, researchers and policy groups, and anyone who might be able to make use of the information to better understand what support and regulation is needed to help communities navigate the new potential to earn money from carbon held within, or in the case of peatlands, not emitted from landscapes if they are restored (i.e., avoided emissions if ‘Business as Usual’ scenarios continued). If you have feedback on the resources and/or would like physical copies of the Executive Summary or Booklet, please email peatlandguide@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Food production in the Fens: navigating towards Net Zero?

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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

Was it a COP-out?

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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.

Promising words. Now to action.

IS IT REALLY RENEWABLE, FOR PEAT’S SAKE?

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I’m re-posting this blog with permission from the University of St Andrews’ Energy Ethics group, for whom I wrote this piece.

As part of Energy Ethics 2020, I joined three other panellists on Friday 13th November to debate the question: Are renewable energy technologies a sustainable solution for meeting the world’s growing energy needs? It was a fascinating 90 minutes, filled with interesting and shocking facts about the dimensions of renewable energy in the 21st Century. I learnt that if we wanted to rely on biofuels, we would have to plant crops on the whole of the world’s terrestrial surface in order to replace the 15 Empire State Buildings’ worth of crude oil that is currently extracted per day; that an average electric car uses three times more copper than a conventional car (where does this come from!?); and that many people in the Majority World lack access to sufficient energy to light up their homes for educational purposes or to cook without subjecting the household to air pollution, let alone have access to renewable energy sources. The challenges of powering the world on renewable technologies were as palpable as the need to overcome them in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; and reducing this reliance is imperative if we are to limit the impacts of ongoing climate change.

I am an ecologist, who has studied landscapes in which bio-energy production has been one option for land use. Since energy use and sourcing is a topic that touches all of our lives, I have spent some time thinking about how we might produce renewable energy whilst ensuring we uphold the environmental pillar of sustainable practice. I remember being excited by palm oil, touted as the great solution to diesel-fuelled transport. After millions of hectares of Southeast Asia were converted into oil palm plantations, the critiques started to roll in: we are taking up precious agricultural land to fill our cars with biofuels whilst people starve; we are destroying miles upon miles of biodiverse tropical forest to plant a monoculture that provides limited habitat for wildlife; we are creating huge carbon emissions in the process of growing this ‘renewable’ fuel, amongst other condemnations. I remember getting excited about Jatropha, claimed to be a more renewable alternative, as a biomass crop that could be grown in areas that were already ecologically degraded. But Jatropha did not prove the golden ticket either: the crop requires significant inputs of fertilisers, pesticides and water (through irrigation systems) in order to be productive, and the process of converting Jatropha seed oil into biodiesel results in large greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions itself. There are large questions around the sustainability of these two biofuels (and many others). There is also enquiry to be made around whether they are actually truly ’renewable’.

A commercial plantation in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, where the oil palm, Elaeis guineensis, is grown to produce palm oil. [Photo credit: Lydia Cole]

According to Oxford’s online Lexico, a renewable resource is defined as one that is “not depleted by use”. The resource therefore has to regenerate at the same rate that it is harvested or otherwise consumed. For example, sufficient time must be left between the logging rotations in a tree plantation to ensure that the trees grow to reproductive age before they are harvested. If trees are harvested too early in their growth cycle for natural regeneration to take place, a key dimension of the renewability of the resource is undermined, along with the interdependent system in which it grows: the soil, with its finite stock of nutrients and growing material; the water supply to ecosystem; and the diversity of plants and animals involved in nutrient cycling and natural regeneration. If the context and condition of the whole ecosystem is considered, as the fundamental housing from which renewable resources are produced, many of our current ‘renewable’ resources would be axed from the list.

An area of deforested peatland in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, in the process of being converted into an oil palm plantation. [Photo credit: Lydia Cole]

One resource that epitomises this renewability challenge is peat. Peat accumulates at an average rate of one millimetre per year, in waterlogged environments where the lack of oxygen slows down or entirely halts the process of decomposition. Burning one cubic meter of extracted peat is the equivalent to releasing one thousand years of accumulated carbon. It is produced through the natural process of harnessing the sun’s energy via photosynthesis, the same process as produces wood-fuel, but the slow regeneration time of peat demands that if we burn it, we must do so at an impractically slow rate.

Aside from the extensive time required to re-accumulate the equivalent carbon belowground that is extracted when peat is harvested, the process of extraction itself often leads to large carbon emissions. The equipment deployed uses fossil fuelled combustion engines and emits CO2, but even greater volumes of GHGs result from the disruption of the waterlogged environment, which is an inevitable part of the extraction process. This prevents the ongoing ‘sinking’ of CO2 from the atmosphere into the peat substrate. It also results in the release of carbon that was previously inaccessible to the forces of decomposition, which cycles the plant-derived organic carbon back into the atmospheric gas that we have come to dread. Rwanda, a country striving for domestic energy security and energy accessibility for all, has recently built a peat-fired power station. International financing and engineering assistance, primarily from Finland, has supported the development of this “sustainable electricity” infrastructure. But this strategy of burning peat for electricity generation is far from sustainable, and even further from a system harnessing a renewable resource, as I have touched on here.

Rwanda’s first peat-fired power plant at Gishoma. [Photo credit: Rwanda Energy Group/Twitter]

Though the balancing of the three pillars of environment, society and economics to develop sustainable solutions to meet our energy needs is no trivial task, a sufficient understanding and consideration of the environment component is essential if the other two pillars are not to be undermined. But when has any big transition occurred without challenge? And it is challenge that drives innovation and positive change. To end the discussion, the panellists were asked for their final (ideally positive!) reflections in order to provide food for thought moving forward. Building decentralised, appropriate renewable energy systems at a community level was mentioned by several of us. One panellist emphasised the need to create macro-policies with micro-foundations. He also reflected on the need for a dimension of international cooperation and support, through knowledge transfer and financial assistance, to lend the opportunities of renewable energy to those countries less able to develop their own. Promisingly, finding the money for these initiatives now seems more possible than ever, with recent COVID-19 related budget decisions demonstrating to the population here in the UK that our national Government can deliver when it chooses to. There was further optimism in the recent election of a new leader in the United States of America, Joe Biden, who has both acknowledged the reality of climate change and will likely choose to provide national and international leadership on approaches to solve this challenge. But we were reminded, as conscious citizens, that we must hold our leaders to account and show them that we are willing to embrace equitable and truly sustainable solutions to one of the greatest challenges of our age.

#WorldPeatlandsDay, the First

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Re-posting here a quick plug I made for World Peatlands Day on the Tropical Wetlands Consortium blog.  Any excuse to post about peat.

Tuesday 2nd June, 2020, marked the first ever World Peatlands Day – a celebration of all things boggy, swampy, sucky, blanket-y, fen-y, etc.  The International Peatland Society launched the event in August 2019, to draw attention to peatlands as being a unique ecosystem type, with a unique set of values and challenges associated with their sustainable management, and thus deserving of a separate international day of recognition.  The longer-established World Wetlands Day happens on 2nd February every year, bringing the vast range of wetlands into the public eye; ecosystems that we all interact with and rely on in some way.  Peatlands are one major part of that story.

In celebration of the day, re-peat put on Peat-Fest, a very impressive 24 hours of online peat-related fun.  The British Ecological Society’s Peatlands Research and Conservation Ecology Groups co-hosted a peat- and conservation-themed quiz (part-organised and attended by members of the Tropical Wetlands Consortium).  Here are a few popular tweets illustrating yesterday’s celebration….

But if World Peatlands Day passed you by, don’t fear; there are plenty more days to celebrate peatlands to come*.  International BogDay is on Sunday 26th July, the World Bogsnorkelling Championships (now cancelled) are usually in mid-Wales (UK) on the August Bank Holiday weekend, and in July of 2021, the Swamp Soccer World Championships is to be held in Finland.  Do let us know if you spot more opportunities to celebrate these important ecosystems, in the Global North, South or swamps.

Friend and FAO

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Earlier this year, as a result of making friends at a conference years ago, I had the privilege of working with a bunch of the world’s most knowledgeable peat-ple on this article for the FAO, published to coincide with COP25: Peatlands: the challenge of mapping the world’s invisible stores of carbon and water. (Page 46-57 in the linked document).

Our main message, watered-down, is that mapping peatlands is no easy task and there is still much work to do on the ground, and across the globe….but we are fast working on these knowledge gaps and know enough about the important role that peatlands play in mitigating climatic change that we would be fools to let them squander.

Sucked in (to the swamps)

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About a month ago, I got back from my first ever trip to the continent of South America.  And the reason for my visit?  Peat, of course.  Here is a blog post I wrote for my new(ish) research group, the Tropical Wetlands Consortium, on my recent adventure to the “chupaderas”, or sucking swamps, of the western Amazon. 

Anna_aguajal

A colleague, being sucked in.  (She is entering a type of palm swamp dominated by Mauritia flexuosa, locally known as an aguajál and important for the fruit that can be harvested there.)

At the end of June, I got back from two months of fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon.  The swamps, the Amazon, Peru, and indeed South America, were all new to me, having spent most of my research career to date searching for remnants of intact peatlands in Southeast Asia.

In the Pastaza-Maranon Foreland Basin (PMFB), a large area of the lowland Amazon within the Department of Loreto, Peru, you’re pushed to find any land that isn’t swampy to walk on.  Mapping projects to date have estimated the peatlands of the PMFB to cover 100,000km2.  One of the reasons I was there, along with six colleagues (from the Universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh and Manchester) and a bunch of exceptional assistants, was to help improve the accuracy of this estimate.  We each had slightly different data gathering agendas, but overall were trying to find out more about the evolution, ecology, condition and value of these peatlands, both from a local and global perspective.

Dael_Veinte

Washing clothes in Veinte de Enero, on the banks of the Yanayacu river, on one of the many fine evenings after coming back from a sweaty day in the swamps.

My focus, along with that of Luis Andueza (fellow St Andrean) and Charlotte Wheeler (Edinburgh), was to investigate how people value the wetland ecosystems of the PMFB.  Luis formed a key part of the social science team, made up of a great bunch of co-investigators and assistants from the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP).  They spent many hours asking many questions of the members of three communities, Veinte de Enero, Nueva Union and Nueva Pandora, living on the banks of the Yanayacu, Chambira and Tigrillo rivers, respectively.  They, incidentally, drank a variety of liquids during the interviews, to facilitate their social integration with the communities!

Chambira_plot

The ecological crew I was with, busy measuring what we measure in a plot.  Spot the agile one up the tree.  Never have I seen such heights scaled so quickly, and with such ease!  (I might need to adapt the Risk Assessment for the next trip, however.)

Concurrently, Charlotte and myself, led by our brilliant botanist, Nállarett, and two courageous Field Assistants, Julio S and Julio I, were out exploring the many ecosystems that surrounded these communities.  Our work was, in essence, a big treasure hunt.  Our mission (that I questioned why I’d chosen to accept at various points of inundation!) was to find the gold – the code-word for peat.  We ventured into the environment surrounding the three communities in order to “ground-truth” information of two sorts: (i) ecosystem types/resource extraction locations marked on participatory maps generated by the communities in workshops run by the social science team, and (ii) maps generated through remote sensing (using Landsat imagery) that depict changes in land cover, with the different ‘covers’ yet to be confidently identified or understood from an ecological perspective.  We spent approximately 20 days cutting our way through swampy forests of all shapes and sizes.  When we came across a new ecosystem type, and felt that we could work at that location for two hours without sinking, we gathered data on various above- and below-ground characteristics.  One of the most challenging plots was half a meter under water, at a location aptly named “31 Devils”.  Thankfully, I’ve had previous experience of snorkelling in bogs.

Now that we’re all back on solid ground, we’re starting to explore all of the ecological and interview data collected from the swamps, to try to understand how people use, and importantly, how they value the wetlands ecosystems of the PMFB, as well as understanding the physical characteristics of these ecosystems from a western scientific perspective.  Our initial findings suggest that there are a whole range of forested wetlands used by these communities, composed of a huge diversity of flora on both peat and non-peatlands, and on a confusing mix of peaty-lands in between.  And, not unsurprisingly, people tend to avoid the deeper, looser, more “sucking”, mosquito-ridden swamps, when and where they can!  Sensible folk.  But we still have much to learn about the nuances of how each community values these carbon-rich, biodiverse and beautiful ecosystems.

Whole_group_Veinte

Some of the great team, fresh-faced and smiling at the start of our fieldwork campaign!  (One member of the team may have been carried over the swamps in some parts.  Many other members of the team wished someone would carry them over the swamps in all parts.

 

That Indonesian Peat Prize

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Last week, a peaty piece of mine was published in the year’s first issue of Peatlands International, the magazine of the International Peatland Society.  Appropriate fodder for my blog, I thought.

~

After much anticipation, on World Wetlands Day in February of this year, the winning team of the Indonesian Peat Prize was revealed.  With two years from launch to completion, spanning a period of new and recurring outbreaks of fire in the country, controversial instructions on the use of peatland concessions and growing international pressure to divest funds from the palm oil industry, this announcement is much welcomed.  But what is the Indonesian Peat Prize?  Who are the winners?  And importantly, how might it contribute to tropical peatland conservation?

An area of deforested, drained and burnt peatland, converted into smallholder agriculture, within a Biodiversity Concession, Central Kalimantan province. Mapping of these activities, and the depth of peat on which they are happening, will assist with planning more responsible landscape management.

What is the Indonesian Peat Prize?

After the devastating peat fires of 2015, creating a toxic haze that covered parts of Southeast Asia for months, the spotlight was on Indonesia to address the cause of the burning.  Unsustainable land use in peatland areas was the primary offender, whether resulting from activities of industrial-scale oil palm and pulp and paper companies, smallholders, or a mixture of both.  Who exactly is to blame varies by place and perspective; further discussion of which will be left for another day!  In order to address this international disaster and restore the burnt landscapes, the Indonesian Government established the Peatland Restoration Agency, or BRG, in January of 2016.

Before the BRG could address the challenge of understanding the distribution of peatland (mis)uses and consider where to restore the ecosystem, there was a need to know where the peat actually is, and crucially, how deep it is.  There was already a map of peatland distribution in Indonesia: Wetlands International compiled one in 2004 and the Ministry of Agriculture in 2011, which can be accessed through the Global Forest Watch platform.  However, these maps offer a very coarse spatial resolution and an even coarser indication of how thick the peat is.  Since their production, earth observation and ground-based technologies have improved dramatically, making higher resolution mapping more feasible.

Cue the Indonesian Peat Prize.  The David and Lucile Packard Foundation provided one million USD to the Indonesian Government’s Geospatial Information Agency (BIG) with which to launch an international competition with the primary goal of developing a “fast, accurate and cost-effective way to map Indonesia’s vast tropical peatlands”.  The open competition had been bubbling away since February 2016, with a selection of finalists being put through their paces over the last six months.  But there could only be one winner!

And the winner is ….

The winning team is an international collaboration of scientists (mostly men!), coming from Indonesia, Germany and the Netherlands.  The aptly named International Peat Mapping Team (IPMT) comprises members from Indonesia’s Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), South Sumatra province’s Sriwijaya University, and three German institutions: Greifswald University, the Remote Sensing Solutions GmbH (RSS) and Airbus DS Geo.  They convinced the judges of their ability to create a prototype method for surveying the country’s peatlands, with their proposed “multistage” solution: a cost-effective, versatile combination of satellite remote sensing, airborne LiDAR and ground-based measurements.  Though this group was awarded the prize, other finalists proposed using similar techniques (with the possibility of lower costs) which may also form part of the solution as the exercise unfolds.

A new oil palm plantation under development, at the edge of a protected peatland (with remnant peat swamp forest visible in the background). How far into the peat dome the plantation extends, and thus the extent of impact, will be measurable using the new mapping techniques.

How might the prize help peat?

In theory, the map will create a universal, repeatable method for mapping peatlands across Indonesia (and potentially the world).  Having One Map from which land covers can be defined and land uses observed and allocated will enable a greater transparency in local and national government decision-making.  It may also help to reduce the regular conflict encountered when land management decisions are made without complete information on land use and tenure.

In practice however, a lot of money has been spent on a mapping exercise that will only mean anything if there is money to spend on the management exercise to accompany it.  The conservation challenge on the ground is likely less to do with knowing the exact depth of a peat substrate and more to do with the depth of understanding of the people living there of how important maintaining a wet peatland is; coupled with the depth of understanding of the challenges and aspirations of those people by the institutions proposing sustainable management policies.  The cost of understanding the extent of the challenge, of figuring out how to restore such a transformed landscape and of enforcing the variety of potential policy solutions must not be underestimated.

Nazir Foead, the Head of the BRG, tasked with one of the most challenging jobs in the world, is “optimistic that the agency will complete the restoration program [of over 2 million hectares] by 2020“.  To put this into perspective, the UK has committed to having two million hectares of restored or sustainably managed peatlands by 2040, and that will likely be a struggle despite the growing funds available, the restoration expertise sourced from across the northern hemisphere and the level of national support (in the most part).  But the political commitment and transparency shown by Indonesia is admirable, and strongly welcomed at this critical point in the story of tropical peatlands.

Congratulations to the winners; good luck to the BRG.  Your work is just beginning!

Power from peat in Rwanda

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Last week, an article that I showcased on my blog a few months ago was published (re-vamped) in The Conversation.  Since it went live, I’ve had some very interesting comments and conversations about where and how we get our electricity.  What is the best source of power for a country?  What factors are considered in making that choice?  Which takes precedence over energy-efficiency, cost-effectiveness and environmental impact?  Is the latter even considered?  I am beginning to understand the complexity of issues involved in making choices between fossil fuels, renewables, national and international energy supplies, access and development.  But I have much still to learn.  It’s perhaps the biggest challenge of our time.  Whatever the answer though, power from peat is surely not a solution.

Rwanda adds to energy mix with first peat-fired power plant in Africa

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Rwanda’s first peat-fired power plant at Gishoma is currently running at 10.85MW.
Rwanda Energy Group/Twitter

Lydia Cole, University of Oxford

Rwanda recently celebrated the opening of its first peat-fired power plant at Gishoma in the far west of the country, a $39.2M project. It is the first of its kind in Africa. The Conversation

Another larger peat plant, costing $350M is under development in Gisagara to the east. The plan is for Gishoma to start feeding 15MW of electricity into the national grid imminently, and Gisagara 80MW by 2019.

The Rwandan government is hoping to achieve its goal of connecting 70% of the country’s 11.7 million people to the national grid by 2018. This is a near three-fold increase on the number connected at present. The peat-to-power plant at Gishoma will contribute to this goal, and further increase the installed capacity of the nation. This will reduce Rwanda’s reliance on expensive imports of diesel oil for power generation.

At the moment, only 25% of households have access to the 190MW of power generated in country. But over the next two years the capacity is projected to reach 563MW in line with national development goals. This increase will be made possible in part through the harnessing of power from peat.

Peat power

Peat provides an effective energy source when dried, comprising a minimum of 30% organic matter. It develops under anaerobic conditions, where waterlogging significantly slows or prevents the decomposition of dead vegetation. As the vegetation grows in the surface layers, it absorbs atmospheric carbon through the process of photosynthesis. When it dies, this carbon is stored in the accumulating substrate which is peat.

Peatlands are found across the world. But they are concentrated within certain regions where high humidity or low temperatures reduce the rate of decomposition. These include the coastal lowlands of southeast Asia or northern Russia’s permafrost zones. Despite covering just 3% of the world’s ice-free land surface, peatlands store up to 30% of its total soil carbon stock. This makes them the most efficient carbon storage facility we have.

But arguably, not a renewable one. Though each peatland varies, one centimetre depth of peat may take an average of 10 years to accumulate, and less than 10 minutes to burn.

Rwanda energy mix

Rwanda’s energy comes from a diverse mix of renewable sources. Hydro-power is the main contributor at 59%, followed by thermal (40%) and methane (1%). There are also ambitious plans for off-grid power from solar.

Peat power is considered one of these more sustainable indigenous sources of energy. It has the potential to contribute nearly 20% to the national energy supply in five years’ time.

The Gishoma plant is nestled within the Nyungwe Forest National Park.
Shutterstock

It’s estimated that there will be sufficient peat deposits to power Rwanda for 30 years, or some proportion of the country at least. The enhanced power that will come from the Gishoma and Gisagara peat-to-power plants is seen as an important part of the country’s development provision.

The plans are enabled through financial support from the African Finance Corporation, the Development Bank of Rwanda and Finnfund, the Finnish Development Finance Company, among other lenders. Finland has expertise in peat extraction and its use in the energy industry, with an average of 5% of its national supply coming from peat. This was encouraged by subsidies until recently.

But where is Rwanda’s peat?

The Gishoma plant is nestled within the Nyungwe Forest National Park. This is an

untouched natural rainforest that is filled with exciting biodiversity.

The park’s website boasts of the presence of hundreds of species of trees and orchids within the park, such as the swamp-dwelling Eulophia horsfellii. It’s also host to numerous plants species of medicinal value, like the East African satinwood, Zanthoxylum gilletii, and to one of the last stable populations of chimpanzees in East Africa. But there is no mention of peat. It’s evidently not a key feature for the average tourist.

There are vast areas of peatlands across the Tropics that we are only now starting to map and understand their full extent and carbon content. For example, it was only a few months ago that the first map of the world’s largest tropical peat complex was published. Around 145,500 square kms of peat swamp forest was found in the central Congo Basin.

There may well be vast resources of peat in Rwanda that local residents have known about for years, or that the Finns have sniffed out recently, of which science has yet to be told or be concerned about. But whatever the scenario defining the nation’s peaty asset and wherever it is exactly, it is unlikely to be there for much longer if peat-to-power generation continues to be Rwanda’s cost competitive energy solution.

Given that it takes thousands of years to accumulate just hundreds of centimetres of peat, is peat-power really the solution to the nation’s energy needs? Can the Elon Musk’s out there create an energy-storage solution quickly enough that renewables make a serious contribution?

For now though, Rwanda is set to power through its peat.

Lydia Cole, Researcher Associate of the Department of Zoology; Environmental Scientist, Rezatec Ltd., University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.