Locally-led EIP scheme for rewetting  farmed peatland

Minister of State Senator Pippa Hackett: funds for farmed peatland scheme.

The first step to rewetting more drained peatlands in the midlands has been taken by Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Senator Pippa Hackett.

She has launched a call for a new locally-led scheme for rewetting of farmed peatland.

She seeks proposals for development and implementation of a scheme to target climate action on peatland under agricultural management.

The scheme will look for sustainable land management options which:

•   Protect the carbon stock and restore sequestration associated with drained peatlands under agricultural management.
•  Maximise other ecosystem service co-benefits such as protection of biodiversity, water quality and water regulation.
•  Build resilience to the impacts of climate change at catchment/landscape level.

Minister Hackett said, “How we manage our peatlands can play an important part in removing carbon from our environment and assist us in tackling climate change.”

All applications to the call for proposals will be evaluated by a committee for relevance and ability to tackle the challenges raised by agricultural peatlands.

A final shortlist will be formed from which the Department of Agriculture will select one or more projects for implementation in 2021 and 2022, with up to 100% funding provided, as part of the European Innovation Partnerships Initiative (EIP),

A number of successful locally-led schemes of this kind are in place, community-based schemes bringing farmers together for common causes, delivering environmental gains across the country.

Payments are results-based in these schemes, which include the Burren Programme, Hen Harrier Programme, and Pearl Mussel Project, among 23 supported by the DAFM.

Applications for the new locally-led scheme for rewetting of farmed peatland should be submitted by 5pm on October 23, 2020.

Strategic areas for climate change mitigation

• Recent research by German peatland researchers indicated that peatlands are strategic areas for climate change mitigation because of their very high carbon stocks.

Drained peatlands release this carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2).

Peatland rewetting effectively stops these CO2 emissions, but also re-establishes the emission of methane (CH4).

“Essentially, management must choose between CO2 emissions from drained, or CH4 emissions from rewetted, peatland,” said the peatland researchers at the Universities of Greifswald and Rostock.

“This choice must consider radiative effects and atmospheric lifetimes of both gases, with CO2 being a weak but persistent, and CH4 a strong but short-lived, greenhouse gas.

“The resulting climatic effects are, thus, strongly time-dependent.”

“Our results show that CH4 radiative forcing does not undermine the climate change mitigation potential of peatland rewetting.

“Instead, postponing rewetting increases the long-term warming effect through continued CO2 emissions.”