Now is the time apply restoration to heal the scars that peat extraction has caused to Finnish nature– why is the Finnish government about to select another route?
Recent research indicates that abandoned cutaway peatlands should not be treated as uniform landscapes with a single optimal after-use. Even within a single site, some areas may be well suited for rewetting and restoration, while others may be more suitable for afforestation or alternative land uses. Policies should therefore support site-specific solutions rather than favouring one land-use option across entire peat extraction areas.
In the past, Finland strongly relied on peat as a source of energy, to the extent that around 6% of our energy come from burning peat. This has now mostly ended but, as a legacy, there are 90,000 hectares of abandoned cutaway peatlands, and the area is estimated to increase by 3,000–5,000 ha annually. While elsewhere in Europe and Canada these areas are actively restored to recreate living mires (peat accumulating wetlands) to support biodiversity and protect soil carbon, Finland appears to select another route.
The government of Finland is planning a new incentive for landowners to transform these abandoned sites to forests, or rather, tree monocultures. The planned support is 2,400 euros per hectare. While public funding is available for peatland restoration through project-based mechanisms, these funding instruments are generally not directly available to private landowners in the same way as the proposed afforestation subsidy. As a result, the policy creates a substantially stronger financial incentive for tree planting than for ecological restoration.
In addition to support to Finnish forestry, the support to tree planting is partly motived by carbon sink function. For sure, growing seedlings and later, trees, bind atmospheric carbon. However, the organic matter in the leftover peat and underlying mineral soil continues its decomposition releasing carbon into atmosphere. In this solution, long-term carbon store in soil is exchanged to short-term carbon store in biomass. While this is a better solution than to leave these sites abandoned and allow their soil carbon to escape to atmosphere, other countries have selected a way towards peat accumulating mire ecosystem, i.e. restoration by rewetting.
Centre of Excellence Peatlands, Climate Change and Restoration (PeatResC), funded by Research Council of Finland, studies the biodiversity and climate impacts of peatland restoration to provide science-based understanding to support political decision making. The fate of future carbon will be predicted based on the understanding of peatland processes and climate change, with rising temperatures accelerating peat decomposition. While it takes time to gather evidence from long-term processes related to peatland restoration, the loss of biodiversity and carbon from the drained organic soils is already shown in multiple studies.
