Concept

Peatland

Also known as: bog, fen, mire, tropical peatland, blanket bog

A waterlogged ecosystem in which dead plant material accumulates faster than it decomposes — the cold, anaerobic conditions below the water table preserving partly-decomposed organic matter as peat. Peatlands cover only ~3% of Earth's land surface but store roughly twice as much carbon as all the world's forests combined. Major peat regions: the boreal blanket bogs of Russia, Canada, Scandinavia, and Scotland; the tropical peat swamps of Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra; the [[congo-basin|Cuvette Centrale]] of the central Congo Basin (the largest tropical peatland complex on Earth, mapped only in 2017); the [[atlantic-forest|Atlantic Forest]] coastal peatlands; the Patagonian *turberas*; and the immense West Siberian Lowland peat. Drainage, fire, and conversion to agriculture release peatland carbon at scales that dwarf almost any other land-use carbon flux.

How peat forms

In most terrestrial ecosystems, dead plant material is decomposed by aerobic microbes that return carbon to the atmosphere as CO₂. In waterlogged soils, oxygen cannot diffuse below the water table; decomposition slows by orders of magnitude. Dead vegetation accumulates as peat — partly-decomposed plant material with carbon contents typically 50% or higher by dry mass. Northern blanket bogs are dominated by Sphagnum moss, whose own chemistry actively acidifies and waterlogs the substrate, accelerating the peat-accumulation feedback. Tropical peat swamps are dominated by woody peat from rainforest trees in seasonally or permanently waterlogged terrain.

A peatland accumulating peat at a rate of 1 mm per year — a typical rate — has been building for 5,000 to 10,000 years where the peat is 5–10 m deep. Some West Siberian and Russian peat is over 25,000 years old at the base.

The carbon-sink dimension

Peatlands cover only ~3% of Earth’s land surface but store approximately 600 gigatons of carbon — about twice the carbon stored in all the world’s forests combined. The Cuvette Centrale alone stores roughly 30 billion tonnes of carbon (Dargie et al. 2017) — the carbon equivalent of three years of global fossil-fuel emissions. When peatland is drained and the water table drops below the peat surface, the previously anaerobic peat oxidizes and releases its carbon as CO₂. When drained peatland burns, the carbon-release rate jumps by orders of magnitude. Indonesian peat fires in 2015 released an estimated 11.3 megatons of CO₂ per day at peak — more than the daily emissions of the European Union — producing the worst short-term air-pollution event in Southeast Asian history.

Global peatland regions

West Siberian Lowland. The largest single peatland complex on Earth — approximately 600,000 km², roughly the size of France-and-Germany combined.
Canadian Boreal Shield and Hudson Bay Lowlands. The world’s second-largest peat region, covering eastern and central Canada.
Cuvette Centrale (central [[congo-basin|Congo Basin]]). Mapped at ~145,000 km² in 2017 — the largest tropical peatland and the most globally significant unprotected peat carbon stock.
Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra. Tropical peat swamps that have been substantially converted to oil palm and Acacia pulp plantations; the source of the catastrophic 1997, 2002, 2006, 2013, 2015, and 2019 peat-fire-and-haze events.
Scotland’s Flow Country, Irish raised bogs, Scandinavian mires. Smaller temperate peatlands of substantial ecological and cultural significance — Irish peat (turf) cutting is a continuing rural-cultural practice now in slow phase-out for climate reasons.
Patagonian turberas. Southern Chile and Argentina, smaller in area but ecologically distinct.

Restoration and protection

Peatland rewetting — restoring drained peatlands by raising the water table back to or above the peat surface — is the most carbon-cost-effective land-restoration intervention currently known. Per hectare, rewetting a drained peatland avoids 5–20 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions per year, far more than reforesting upland farmland. Indonesia’s Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG), Scotland’s Peatland Action programme, and the IUCN UK Peatland Programme are scaled examples; the Cuvette Centrale remains largely without active protective programme despite its scale of significance.

Sources

Dargie et al. 2017, Nature — Cuvette Centrale mapping
Page, Susan E. et al., “Global and regional importance of the tropical peatland carbon pool” (Global Change Biology 2011)
IUCN UK Peatland Programme

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