LIFE Multi Peat

Objectives and scope

➣ Restoration of degraded peatlands: improving hydrological situation (e.g. drainage ditches), removing trees and shrubs / Improving the state of habitats and relevant species

➣ Establish paludiculture solutions: feasibility studies in Belgium and Germany

➣ Develop an EU-wide toolkit to catalogue peatland projects, policies and data

Expected impacts

➣ 689 ha of degraded peatlands restored

➣ Up to 50% reduction of Global Warming Potential on all sites (3600 t CO2-eq./yr)

➣ Strategies for paludiculture (also as buffer zones) in Germany and Belgium

➣ Improved communication and coordinated collaboration amongst EU peatland projects

➣ Recommendations for scaling up peatland restoration

Planned restoration activities

➣ Poland (252 ha): Orawa Bogs

➣ Germany (20 - 60 ha*): Häsener Luch
* The central 20 ha peatland owned by NABU is planned to become a living peatland again. The project also expects to improve the peatland conditions of the rest of the nature reserve which covers a total of around 60 ha.

➣ Belgium (130 ha): Vallei van de Grote beek

➣ Netherlands (30 ha): Witte Veen

➣ Ireland (217 ha): Connemara

The restoration measures seek to reestablish the natural function of peatlands as carbon sinks. This mainly entails rewetting drained areas, though actions will vary according to individual conditions of each project site. For example, in some areas shrubs and trees will be removed and active planting of peat forming vegetation will be carried out.

Monitoring activities

To assess the climate effect of the restoration, the project is using two techniques:

(a) the Greenhouse Gas Emission Site Type (GEST) approach which estimates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the sites based on vegetation composition and water levels

(b) direct measurements, with transparent and non-transparent chambers

To learn more about monitoring techniques you can check this feature or this one here.

From a longer time perspective, GHG emissions will be measured by the closed chamber technique, 3 sites per country:

➣ Reference site without restoration activities

➣ Rewetted site directly affected by restoration activities

➣ Restored site (5-10 years ago)

Environmental parameters will be recorded: water level, soil temperature, soil moisture and photosynthetic active radiation by automatic loggers for modelling approaches.

LIFE Multi Peat will set monitoring plots, perform a final vegetation mapping and calculate the GHG budgets during and after the restorations.

Communication objectives

Overall objective
‘Branding’ LIFE Multi Peat via increasing the recognition of the project name, its main goals and outputs to create broader support for peatland restoration and conservation across Europe

Specific objectives

➣ Increasing knowledge
Sharing and exchanging the experience and lessons learned from the project implementation, including paludiculture techniques, peatland restoration measures as well as GHG monitoring instruments: The project’s communication activities will contribute to the body of knowledge on peatland restoration, reduction of carbon emissions, and increase of carbon storage. Moreover, the creation and dissemination of an EU-wide policy catalogue will improve the public knowledge and awareness of peatland issues, including policy and environmental information.

➣ Raising awareness / influencing attitude
As part of this objective, the goal is to showcase how healthy peatlands contribute to mitigating climate change by functioning as carbon sinks, halting drainage and GHG emissions. Moreover, raising awareness in the decision-making arena by fact sheets, key policy analyses and recommendations, and national reviews of the CAP’s impact on peatlands and GHG emissions is important to ensure informed decisions made by policy-makers in the future.

➣ Changing behaviour
Project partners will attempt to affect behavioral change among target groups to achieve best practices for paludiculture and peatland restoration and management, as well as regarding the development of future peatland policy.