Keynotes
Prof. Dr. Hans Joosten
University of Greifswald, Germany
Hans Joosten studied biology and worked as academic researcher and policy officer in the Netherlands. Since 1996 he has lead the Department of Peatland Studies and Palaeoecology at Greifswald University (Germany), and since 2008 as an Extraordinary Professor. A key research topic of his group is the development of paludiculture (a term he coined in 1998). In 2016 he edited, together with Wendelin Wichtmann and Christian Schröder, the first textbook on paludiculture. Hans Joosten is Secretary- General of the International Mire Conservation Group and since 2009 has been intensively involved in UNFCCC and IPCC, especially with respect to emissions from organic soils, and in FAO in advancing climate-responsible peatland management.
In his keynote speech, Hans Joosten will elaborate how the concept of paludiculture has developed from a niche management option into an inevitable and comprehensive policy strategy to comply with the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. Both political and technical progress has been impressive but is still far from sufficient. Hans will discuss the constraints, challenges, options and perspectives to scale up paludiculture worldwide to reach the ultimate goal: having all peatlands wet again by 2050.
Zélie Peppiette
European Commission, Belgium
Zélie Peppiette is based in Brussels and works in the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development of the European Commission. She is advisor to the Deputy Director-General in charge of sustainability, income support and rural development. Among many other tasks, she has been instrumental in setting up Round Tables on the Green Architecture of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union in 2018-2019, facilitating exchange between agricultural and environmental stakeholders.
She will consider the implications of the future EU policy framework on peatland use in the EU, in particular how the Common Agricultural Policy may affect peatlands and paludiculture.
Dr. Bärbel Tiemeyer
Thünen-Institut, Germany
Dr. Bärbel Tiemeyer studied Land Management and Environmental Protection at Rostock University and Sustainable Management of the Water Environment at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. After returning to Rostock for her PhD, she has been working at the Thünen-Institute since 2010. The Institute of Climate-Smart Agriculture is responsible for the sectors agriculture and LULUCF of the German GHG inventory. She heads this institute’s Peatland Group. Besides conducting research projects on GHG fluxes, hydrology and water quality, the group is responsible for deriving emission factors and regionalisation methods for organic soils in the greenhouse gas inventory.
Bärbel Tiemeyer gave a keynote on GHG emissions from organic soils in Germany – status quo and mitigation options – presenting the current methodology for organic soils in the GHG inventory and its underlying data. Spatial data comprise high resolution maps of land-use, type of organic soil and a map of mean annual water table. Emissions of CO2, N2O and CH4 were synthesized from a large data set. Further, results of recent projects on different management options including water management by ditch blocking and submerged drains in grasslands and paludiculture will be presented and discussed.
Prof. Dr. Kristiina Regina
Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), Finland
Kristiina Regina is an environmental scientist employed by the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). She has studied GHG fluxes and their mitigation on drained peat soils since 1992 but has studied widely soil management options also on mineral soils. Her work has been a combination of experimental work, development of the greenhouse gas inventory and studying the incentives for climate smart land use. She started the first field experiments on paludiculture in Finland. She is a member of the Finnish Climate Change Panel since 2016 but has even earlier served as a link between researchers and policy makers.
Kristiina Regina will discuss current and future peatland use in Europe reflecting on socioeconomic implications, and with a particular focus on the Nordic perspective.