PEATLANDS
Goal: Scale up the conservation and restoration of peatlands as a contribution to biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and sustainable development – ensuring that all remaining undrained peatlands stay intact, while 50 million hectares of drained peatlands are restored by 2050.
Healthy wetlands
2030 TARGET: Safeguard over 20 million hectares of high-value peatlands, including bringing five major peatland landscapes back into good ecological condition. PROGRESS: We are slightly behind schedule. We are making progress to mobilise governmental actors in restoring and safeguarding large peatland areas, we are developing better systems for mapping high-value peatlands to understand where they are, what state they are in and what the main threats are in order to focus climate and biodiversity driven action at country level.
This year brought new protection status for 350,000 hectares of peatlands in Tierra del Fuego, after we worked with the government of Argentina to achieve Ramsar designation for Peninsula Mitre. We helped develop guidelines for better managing tens of thousands of hectares of peatlands in Junín National Reserve, Peru. We have supported a number of governments to identify and map peatlands so they can be included in their national climate and biodiversity plans as an enabling condition to safeguard them. For example, we have supported countries including Argentina, Peru and Indonesia to incorporate peatlands into their climate NDCs. In East Africa we worked on
transboundary peatlands in the Nile Equatorial Lakes basin by working with communities and and on water management in Uganda. In the EU, meanwhile, the new Nature Restoration Law proposes the restoration and rewetting of millions of hectares of peatlands, in part a result of our advocacy efforts in partnership with others. Through the Wet Horizons project, we helped develop a GIS platform to guide peatland and wetland restoration, considering the needs of end- users in the process as a stepping stone towards a Global Peatland Watch, building on the successes of the Global Mangrove Watch.
With support from Greenchoice, and working with partners Wildlife Science and Conservation Center of Mongolia, and our knowledge partner Care for Ecosystems, Wetlands International is restoring the hydrology of degraded peatlands in Mongolia
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Wetlands International Annual Review 2023
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