Interreg Europe: Ambitious policies for peatland restoration, conservation, and sustainable management in Europe

Interreg Europe

01.05.2025 – 31.07.2029

Municipality of Alpiarça (Portugal (Portugal)

Natuurpunt Belgium (Belgique) – експертний партнер

Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Northern Region Development (Montenegro)

Office for Regional Development, Weser and Ems Region (Germany)

City of Mechelen (Belgium (Belgique)

Odense Fjord Collaboration (Denmark)

Administration of Lithuania Minor Protected Areas (Lithuania)

Santarém Polytechnic University (Portugal)

City of Odense  (Denmark)

Peatlands are often overlooked heroes amid the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. Although they cover only 3% of the Earth’s surface, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all forests combined. Healthy peatlands provide invaluable ecosystem services to societies and economies, such as climate regulation, flood prevention, drinking water supply, and supporting rich biodiversity.

Across the EU, climate and agricultural policies have historically overlooked these values, resulting in extensive drainage and degradation of peatlands. To date, more than 50% of Europe’s peatlands are degraded, emitting 230 MT of CO2 annually, equivalent to 135 million cars (EGU, ICCT), and causing the loss of the ecosystem services they provide.

Peatland conservation, restoration, and sustainable management must be scaled up in the EU to reverse this trend. Currently, there is a lack of robust policy frameworks at all levels, which are urgently needed. However, peatland policymaking is complex: it often involves bringing together teams and departments (e.g., agriculture, nature), bridging knowledge gaps collaboratively (e.g., distribution, status, carbon storage, finance options), and changing current practices often requires extensive stakeholder engagement and buy-in — a set of skills and knowledge dispersed across various good practices.

Peat-EU aims to speed up the development of solid policy tools focused on sustainable management, conservation, and restoration of peatlands. It brings together a multi-level, multi-regional partnership of policy authorities and stakeholders to:

– Build a shared understanding of the status, challenges, and opportunities for public authorities working on peatland management policy tools;

– Identify, adapt, adopt, and share good practices that prioritise the sustainable management, conservation, and restoration of peatlands;

– Develop policy improvements that are financially sustainable, scientifically sound, and reflect the realities of multiple stakeholders and departments, while helping to raise awareness of the importance of peatlands;

– Inspire action by other local, regional, and national peers and landmark initiatives, such as the Global and European Peatlands Initiatives (GPI, EPI), and scale up efforts.

This creates a matrix of policy improvements (i.e., carbon, finance, national, regional), which, together with the project’s external network, forms the foundation for replication and scaling across the EU and neighbouring countries.