Paludiculture Newsletter 3|2024

The word paludiculture was born 25 years ago. A "simple" word had to be found for an entire concept: rewetting drained peatlands to stop the emission of greenhouse gases and using it in a new, sustainable form of agriculture. It is made up of two Latin words, palus for swamp and cultura for cultivation. Hans Joosten first published it in 1998 in an essay entitled "Peat as a renewable resource: the road to paludiculture".

A lot has happened since then. This was demonstrated at the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the term, with scientific contributions, a panel discussion and poster session and about 200 participants, organized by the Thünen Institute, the University of Greifswald and the Succow Foundation, the partners in the PaludiZentrale project, on 10th-11th June 2024 in Braunschweig. Pioneers tested paludiculture, research projects have looked at various aspects from sowing to certificates, politicians are dealing with it and companies are beginning to discover paludiculture as a market.

The concept is "as old as Methuselah", said Joosten in Braunschweig, but is now a game changer in the fight against the climate crisis. The professor emeritus sees rewetting and paludiculture as a moral obligation. In view of a world population of more than eight billion people and the net zero CO₂ emissions required to combat the climate crisis, every tonne must be offset immediately. According to Joosten, offsetting climate-damaging products or behaviour in which savers sell their emission reductions to others ("offsets") will no longer be possible after 2050, because "everyone will have to be at zero by then!" The friend of clear words and direct references says: "Peatland dewatering costs human lives". In order to achieve the climate targets set out in the Paris Agreement (2015), there is therefore no alternative to rewetting and sustainable use of peatlands - 50,000 hectares per year in Germany alone and 2 million hectares per year worldwide by 2050.

The collaboration in nine long-term projects was also celebrated. These founded the new PaludiNet network for the exchange of know-how and experience. The four ten-year model and demonstration projects (MuD) WetNetBB (Brandenburg), LivingLab Teufelsmoor, MOOSland and RoNNi (Lower Saxony) funded by the BMEL and the pilot projects BLuMo (Brandenburg), Klimafarm (Schleswig-Holstein), PaludiMV (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) and MoorWERT (Bavaria) funded by the BMUV, each of which also run for ten years, are now part of the network. Their common goal is to establish and manage paludicultures on a practical scale and to establish utilization and marketing chains for the biomass. PaludiZentrale networks and supports the practical projects, ensures uniform data collection, scientifically evaluates the results across the board and takes care of knowledge transfer.

The GMC's Global Peatland Map is now available online and interactive! It comprises eleven pages and covers a wide range of topics, such as the extent of peatlands per country, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity hotspots, peatlands in protected areas and sources of fire. A series of story maps “Peatlands in the Continents” will complement the Global Peatland Map 2.0. for a detailed look at regions offering key facts on peatland distribution, degradation and options for action. Visually intuitive, easy to navigate and beautifully designed, a first story map on Asian Peatlands can already be tried out.

The web version of the Global Peatland Map is based on data from the Global Peatlands Assessment from 2022, which summarized the best available scientific data to provide an overview of the state of peatlands worldwide. As a partner in the Global Peatlands Initiative, the GMC's map specialists created the online version in close cooperation with the World Environment Situation Room of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

There are legal obstacles to the rewetting of peatlands particularly in terms of land availability, planning and approval. This is shown in the new legal report Legal issues in connection with the rewetting of peatlands (in German), published in the Proceedings of the Greifswald Mire Centre. It offers a comprehensive analysis and shows possible solutions to ensure quick rewetting of peatlands and that they can contribute to natural climate protection as important carbon store and sink.

The German government's Natural Climate Protection Action Program aims to protect and strengthen endangered ecosystems such as floodplains, peatlands and forests - and to understand and remove the obstacles that stand in the way of restoring these valuable areas. The new legal report by Prof. Dr. Sabine Schlacke and Prof. Dr. Michael Sauthoff is an important contribution to this. It was produced within the project MoKKa - Peatland Climate Protection through Capacity Building, in which the Succow Foundation, the University of Greifswald and the Baltic Sea Foundation are working together. The results of the report were presented at the end of June 2024 at the "Expert Forum: Accelerating Natural Climate Protection - Improving the Legal Framework", which was jointly organized with the German Federal Environmental Foundation and took place in Berlin. The possibilities for implementing the legal policy recommendations were also discussed.

Climate, water, biodiversity - how this is connected in peatlands and floodplains, what state it is in and how it can be improved - summarizes the new Leopoldina position paper Climate - Water Balance - Biodiversity: For an integrative use of peatlands and floodplains. The 136-page paper by a working group of the same name at the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina was published at the end of June 2024. "Nowhere in Central Europe is biodiversity as high as in these wetlands," says Leopoldina member Prof. Dr. Klement Tockner, Director General of the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung. Near-natural peatlands and floodplains are also essential for preventing flood disasters and reducing CO2 emissions. The position paper with supplementary digital dossier emphasizes the need to rewet peatlands and restore floodplains. Both are already established as climate and biodiversity goals, for the EU for example in the Nature Restoration Law recently adopted by the EU Environment Council and worldwide in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. This provides for the protection and restoration of at least 30% of the world's land, freshwater and marine areas by 2030. The public interest of peatlands is also enshrined in the current German government's coalition agreement.

The position paper now presents options for action to achieve national and international commitments in climate, water and biodiversity protection and still be able to use these areas economically. This includes protecting intact peatlands, changing to paludiculture, honouring ecosystem services and including measures in CO2 emissions trading. Twelve scientists from the fields of ecology, biology, hydrology, sociology, agricultural engineering and environmental economics as well as law were involved - including Dr. Franziska Tanneberger and Prof. Jürgen Kreyling, two scientists from the Greifswald Mire Centre.

A new funding package should be of particular interest to farmers and nature conservation organisations: Investment funding for machinery and equipment to strengthen natural soil functions in agricultural landscapes. Up to 100 million euros are available to purchase machines that exert low pressure on the soil and thus contribute to the long-term preservation of a good soil structure. They will enable wet peatland to be worked gently, grassland to be farmed extensively and weeds to be controlled mechanically. With this measure, Federal Minister for Environment Steffi Lemke wants to support farms not only in rewetting, but also in the careful cultivation of wet peatland. The term of this directive is limited until 31.12.2026.

"Peatlands are like people, only wetter"! Another small difference: with humans you see first death first while in peatlands you first see live: with age, peatlands get bigger, fatter and get wrinkles. Hans Joosten and Swantje Furtak explain how this is meant and assemble other curious people-peatland connections in their new book (in German), with the same title. They dispel the myth of bog bodies, because no-one in the history of mankind has ever sunk into a peatland by accident. They constate that everyone in developed countries eats peat every day and that peat also exists in outer space. There it is called star-tar. Above all, the book explains in an easy and lively way, why peatlands are important for us all as climate protectors. There is one thing close to the hearts of the journalist and the professor emeritus of peatland science at the University of Greifswald and co-founder of the Greifswald Mire Centre: people and peatlands need to find a good way of living together and that can work!
"Peatlands are like people, only wetter" (176 pages, 20 euros) with many illustrative graphics, in the style familiar from Katapult magazine, and was published by Katapult-Verlag.