O

n a chilly September morning in

Scotland’s northern highlands,

a giant excavator rumbles back

and forth across peatlands that

stretch to the horizon. As the wind

whips across the mossy terrain, the

machine’s operator is undoing dec-

ades of damage by smoothing out

the drainage ditches that scar the landscape.

The peat here can reach up to 10 metres

deep and developed slowly over thousands of

years. Then, in the middle of the twentieth cen-

tury, Scotland embarked on an ill-fated effort

to transform the bogs into tree farms. Land-

owners ploughed trenches to drain bogs and

planted pine trees and spruce that often failed

to thrive. As the ventures struggled, research-

ers and the Scottish government started to see

the peatlands in a fresh light, recognizing that

they lock up vast amounts of carbon. If they are

not kept healthy, the bogs could release their

stored carbon and accelerate global warming.

That’s why a team of researchers and land

managers is digging up trees and flattening

furrows in former plantations southwest

of Thurso. The effort is part of a roughly

£50-million (US$65-millon) investment that

the Scottish government and other organ-

izations have made towards restoring the

country’s blanket bogs — undulating carpets

of spongy hummocks built from Sphagnum

mosses. The largest area of blanket bogs in

the world is in the Flow Country — a low-lying

expanse between sheer cliffs to the north and

glacially carved mountains to the southwest.

Remote and exposed, these peatlands are

named after the Norse term floi, which means

boggy ground. They have long been described

as worthless wastelands. “Local people called

the peatlands mamba — miles and miles of

bugger all,” says Roxane Andersen, a bioge-

ochemist at the University of the Highlands

and Islands’ Environmental Research Institute

in Thurso.

More than 80% of the 1.7 million hectares

of peatland in Scotland have been cut for fuel

or other wise degraded, and roughly 500,

hectares have been drained and forested with

non-native conifers. “The reality, though, is the

trees did poorly,” says Andersen.

Despite that, the peatlands have tremen-

dous value for carbon storage. These areas

hold more than one-quarter of all soil carbon,

even though they account for only 3% of Earth’s

land area^1. Globally, peatlands hold more than

twice as much carbon as the world’s forests do,

according to the United Nations Environment

Programme.

But in many places, humans have turned

vast expanses of these environments from

long-term carbon sinks into carbon sources.

Damaged or drained peatlands worldwide

emit at least 2 billion tonnes of carbon diox-

ide annually — roughly 5% of anthropogenic

greenhouse-gas emissions — largely through

peat fires and oxidation of the buried carbon.

And emissions from bogs are expected to rise

sharply.

As the threat of climate change has grown

more severe, researchers and governments

have identified peatlands as ideal targets for

stopping emissions, and even sopping up car-

bon. Although Canada, Russia and Indonesia

contain the largest tracts of peatland in the

world, Scotland has emerged as a leader in

the effort to restore the habitat, which cov-

ers more than 20% of the country (see ‘For

peat’s sake’). Scotland will probably meet, if

not exceed, its 2020 goal of restoring 50,

hectares, mainly on government-owned

nature reserves and forestry land. And it aims

to push that total to 250,000 hectares by 2030.

Restoring peatlands to health is one of the

key ways in which Scotland, which last April

became the first country to declare a climate

emergency, intends to reach net-zero green-

house-gas emissions by 2045. “Scotland has

raced out in front by making good connec-

tions with researchers and government,” says

Jack Rieley, a tropical-peatland ecologist and

executive board member of the International

Peatland Society, which is based in Jyväskylä,

Finland. Researchers from around the world

have flocked to Scotland to glean insights into

how to develop a successful national strategy

for restoring peatland.

The biggest question is whether restora-

tion will simply stop carbon emissions from

peatlands or revive the bogs to the point that

they can store more carbon. Other countries,

notably Indonesia, are also pursuing efforts

to reduce carbon losses from their peatlands.

To make sure that these projects are working,

researchers are developing satellite tech-

niques and other tools to monitor the health

of these landscapes.

But there is no guarantee that the efforts will

pay off. “It’s so easy to break an ecosystem, and

it’s so hard to bring it back,” says Andersen. “We

can’t recreate something from the past, but we

can do our best to make it resilient.”

Tough going

Just over 100 kilometres southwest of Thurso,

the boggy soil is so sodden in spots that I sink

up to my knees and nearly lose a boot. But the

muck hasn’t stopped two excavators — each

more than 13 tonnes — that are fitted with

extra-wide tracks to distribute their weight.

As part of an effort to convert the region back

to bogs, they trundle across the peat, cutting

and stacking stands of trees that have been

there for 30 years.

The timber is low quality, pockmarked by

hungry pests and prone to being blown down,

a hallmark of trees that are growing in acidic

peat. Neil McInnes and Tim Cockerill oversee

this and other restoration projects undertaken

by Forestry and Land Scotland, a government

land-management agency based in Inverness.

The harvest costs more than the timber is

worth, and because the trees will be either

incinerated on site to generate electricity or

made into heating pellets, the carbon in the

trees will return to the atmosphere.

Removing the trees was a bitter pill at first.

Many foresters felt they were being unfairly

A flux tower in Scotland’s Flow Country

measures gas concentrations and other

variables in a peatland.

HANNAH IMLACH

“It’s so easy to break an

ecosystem, and it’s so

hard to bring it back.”

Nature | Vol 578 | 13 February 2020 | 205
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