The underappreciated potential of peatlands in global climate change mitigation strategies

By J. Leifeld, L. Menichetti. Nature Communications, 2018

720 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soil carbon sequestration and avoidable emissions through peatland restoration are both strategies to tackle climate change. Here we compare their potential and environmental costs regarding nitrogen and land demand. In the event that no further areas are exploited, drained peatlands will cumulatively release 80.8 Gt carbon and 2.3 Gt nitrogen. This corresponds to a contemporary annual greenhouse gas emission of 1.91 (0.31–3.38) Gt CO2-eq. that could be saved with peatland restoration. Soil carbon sequestration on all agricultural land has comparable mitigation potential. However, additional nitrogen is needed to build up a similar carbon pool in organic matter of mineral soils, equivalent to 30–80% of the global fertilizer nitrogen application annually. Restoring peatlands is 3.4 times less nitrogen costly and involves a much smaller land area demand than mineral soil carbon sequestration, calling for a stronger consideration of peatland rehabilitation as a mitigation measure. Human activity, such as draining and mining of peatlands, is transforming these long-term carbon sinks into sources. Here, the authors assess current and future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from degrading peatlands and estimate the magnitude of potential GHG savings that could be achieved by restoring them.

Subfields: Ecology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae46df1fb9a7ba37c7c470d6afb40ccbe0c57c6a

How researchers see this paper

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1. Florian Humpenöder
2. A. Popp
3. K. Karstens
4. H. Lotze-Campen
5. J. Leifeld
6. L. Menichetti
7. Elmar Kriegler

Citations in the corpus

• Peatland protection and restoration are key for climate change mitigation (2020, methodology): “However, there are differences at the level of climate zones, which are only reported by two of these studies (Leifeld and Menichetti 2018, Leifeld et al 2019).”