When we think about fighting climate change, rainforests, solar panels, and electric cars usually come to mind first. Few people mention the vast, waterlogged landscapes that have been patiently storing carbon beneath a thin layer of moss for thousands of years. These are peatlands – ecosystems that cover only a few percent of the planet’s land surface, yet store more carbon than all the world’s forests combined.
For decades, peatlands were treated as useless “swamps,” fit only to be drained for farmland, mined for fuel and garden peat, or built over. As a result, only a fraction of Europe’s original peatlands still survive today, and the ones that remain now require active protection. In this article, we take a closer look at why a small peat bog can do more for the climate than a sizeable forest, and what each of us can do to help it survive.
How a Peatland Forms: Thousands of Years of Patient Work
A peatland forms wherever water accumulates faster than it can drain away or evaporate. Under these conditions, dead plant matter doesn’t fully decompose, because the water lacks the oxygen that bacteria and fungi need to break down organic material. Instead of disappearing, dead plant fragments compact into a dense, waterlogged mass called peat, which grows by only a few millimetres each year.
This slow pace means that a peat layer several metres deep can be several thousand years old. Scientists often compare peatlands to a natural climate archive: by analysing pollen grains and the chemical composition of successive peat layers, researchers can reconstruct how a region’s vegetation, temperature, and humidity changed over millennia, long before the first written records existed.
The Role of Sphagnum Moss
Sphagnum moss plays a central role in this process. Its cells have a unique structure that allows them to absorb up to twenty times their own weight in water, acting like a living sponge that keeps the entire ecosystem saturated. Sphagnum also acidifies its surroundings and releases compounds with antibacterial properties, further slowing the decomposition of dead organic matter and encouraging the slow build-up of peat.
Fens, Transitional Bogs, and Raised Bogs
Depending on their water source and soil fertility, peatlands fall into three main categories:
fens – fed by mineral-rich groundwater and dominated by sedges and reeds,
transitional mires – an intermediate stage, combining vegetation typical of both extremes,
raised bogs – fed almost exclusively by rainwater, nutrient-poor, and dominated by sphagnum moss and plants adapted to extremely harsh conditions.
Each type creates a distinct habitat, which is why protecting them requires a different approach and a tailored hydrological strategy.
The Largest Land-Based Carbon Store on Earth
Although they cover only around three percent of the planet’s land surface, peatlands store an amount of carbon comparable to, and by many estimates even greater than, all the world’s forests combined. The secret lies in how that carbon is stored: under oxygen-free conditions, carbon locked away in peat remains stable for thousands of years, rather than cycling through the atmosphere on shorter timescales, as happens with forest biomass.
This is a fundamental difference from forests, which absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide but release a significant share of it back into the atmosphere through decomposition, wildfires, or logging. An undisturbed peatland, by contrast, functions as a long-term climate vault – once carbon is locked into peat, it stays there for practically as long as the water table remains high and the peat layer stays intact.
Biodiversity Found Only on Peatlands
The extreme conditions found on peatlands – acidic, nutrient-poor soil and a permanent excess of water – have given rise to plant and animal species found nowhere else. It is precisely this environmental pressure that has made peatlands some of the most unique, yet still underappreciated, habitats in Europe.
Carnivorous Plants and Ice-Age Relicts
The scarcity of nitrogen in the soil forced some plants to seek alternative sources of nutrients. This evolutionary pressure produced carnivorous plants such as the round-leaved sundew, which trap tiny insects on the sticky hairs of their leaves and digest them to obtain the missing minerals. Peatlands are also home to numerous ice-age relict species – plants that, after the glaciers retreated, found their last refuge in Central Europe within the cool, damp microclimate of these bogs.
Birds and Insects Tied to Peatlands
Peatlands are also home to birds and insects that could not survive in a drier, more altered landscape. These include:
the black grouse, which needs vast, open peatland to perform its courtship display,
the great snipe and other wading birds that nest in wet sedge meadows,
numerous species of dragonflies and butterflies tightly bound to specific host plants that grow only on peat.
For these species, the loss of a peatland means the loss of their only available habitat, with nowhere else to go.
Draining Peatlands: A Hidden Source of CO2 Emissions
When a peatland is drained for farming, construction, or peat extraction, the oxygen-free conditions disappear and air begins to reach the peat. This triggers the oxidation of organic matter that had been accumulating for thousands of years, sending carbon that had been locked away for centuries back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Worse still, this process can continue for years, even long after the land has stopped being farmed.
Drained peatlands also become extremely prone to fire, which is far harder to extinguish than a typical forest fire – flames can smoulder underground for weeks, releasing further greenhouse gases and toxic smoke. On top of that, drained peat soil subsides and loses its original structure, making rewetting significantly harder the longer action is delayed.
Restoring Peatlands: Bringing the Water Back
The good news is that peatland degradation can, in many cases, be halted and even partially reversed. The primary intervention is hydrological restoration – blocking the drainage ditches that, over decades, have been used to remove water from peatlands for agricultural purposes. Building small dams and weirs gradually raises the water table and restores the oxygen-free conditions needed for peat to keep accumulating.
Paludiculture, the agricultural use of rewetted peatlands without draining them, is also gaining popularity. Water-tolerant crops such as reed and cattail are grown on these sites and later used as building material, insulation, or growing medium. This approach reconciles economic needs with climate protection, without requiring the land to be taken entirely out of use.
Peatlands Around Poland and the World
Poland is still home to one of the most valuable peatland complexes in Central Europe: the Biebrza Marshes, within Biebrza National Park, where nearly untouched fens and transitional mires survive across many square kilometres. Similar, if smaller, natural treasures can be found in the Polesie region and the Tuchola Forest, where restoration and conservation programmes are still underway.
On a global scale, the largest peatlands are found in the boreal zone – in Siberia, Canada, and Scandinavia – but vast, ecologically very different tropical peatlands also exist in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia. These tropical peatlands are today among the most threatened ecosystems on Earth, being drained on a massive scale for palm oil plantations, making them one of the largest, yet still underreported, sources of greenhouse gas emissions linked to land-use change.
How You Can Help
Protecting peatlands might seem like a distant issue, disconnected from everyday life, but each of us has a real influence on it. One of the simplest steps is to avoid peat-based garden compost when buying potting soil and to choose available alternatives such as regular compost or coconut coir instead. It’s also worth supporting organisations working on wetland restoration and simply talking about the topic with friends and family, since public awareness in this area remains remarkably low.
At our foundation, we regularly plant trees and create green spaces across Poland, and wherever possible, we try to factor the protection of wetland habitats into our work as well. If you’d like to involve your company in similar initiatives, take a look at our employee volunteering programme, and if you want to deepen your understanding of ecosystems, explore our work with businesses on environmental education. Every action, even the smallest one, brings us closer to a world where peatlands no longer disappear from the map, but continue to play their quiet, irreplaceable role in stabilising the climate.
