Lindholm Tapio Peatlands, climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation: a Nordic-Baltic perspective.

The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands provides a framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. The Convention recognizes the importance of peatlands for climate change mitigation and has called upon countries

The Nordic Baltic Wetlands Initiative (NorBalWet) is a Ramsar regional initiative with as participants Denmark, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden and Oblasts from Northwestern Russia. In 2013 the NorBalWet Initiative initiated a project to assess the importance of Nordic Baltic peatlands for climate regulation. The NorBalWet countries (excl. of Faroe Islands and Russia) hold with almost 250,000 km2 some 6% of the global extent of peatland.

Almost half (46%) of the peatland area of the studied NorBalWet countries has been drained. Rewetting of drained peatlands leads to a substantial reduction of annual greenhouse gas emissions, as the new guidelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) illustrate: Rewetting of peatland is consistent with a wide variety of policy initiatives and agreements of which the NorBalWet countries are part, including – next to the Ramsar Convention – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol (KP), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Aichi Targets, the UNESCO World Heritage Convention and the Strategy for the Heritage Management of Wetlands of the European Archaeological Council, the climate initiatives of the UN Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO) and the European Union, the EU Habitats and Water Framework Directives, and the Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area (Helsinki Convention). Especially the “wise use” concept of the Ramsar Convention may provide an important bridge between these initiatives. A crucial element of such strategy would be to use peatland Ramsar sites as centres for raising awareness.
Peatlands and Climate in a Ramsar context. A Nordic-Baltic Perspective. - TemaNord 2015:544 ISSN 0908-6692