The long and winding peatland road to Copenhagen,
stage Bonn III

by Hans Joosten, published in: IMCG Newsletter 2009(2): page 20-23.

Peatlands should be an easy issue in the climate discussion. When drained (for agriculture, forestry, peat extraction…) they emit huge quantities of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and nitrous oxide (N₂O). Worldwide nearly 10% of all anthropogenic emissions stem from drained peatland. Rewetting stops these emissions. Many drained peatlands are marginal agricultural land; large areas are abandoned and can easily be rewetted. “Low hanging fruit” thus for climate change mitigation, as UNEP director Achim Steiner expressed it a year ago.

Indeed environmental groups (incl. IMCG) and relevant countries are vigorously trying in the last couple of years to get peatland rewetting recognized as an official instrument under the Climate Convention. One would think that this opportunity would be enthusiastically embraced. But the construction of the Convention and its important instrument the Kyoto Protocol make things complicated and progress slow. A report from the discussions in and around the Ad Hoc Working Group on Land Use Land Use Change and Forestry (AWG-KP LULUCF) at the 2009 Bonn III climate meetings (10-14 August 2009).

Kyoto Protocol

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has as its goal to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. The Kyoto Protocol (KP) is the legally binding commitment for the industrialized nations (the annex I countries of the UNFCCC) and formulates general tasks for all member countries.

The Kyoto Protocol was initially developed to curb industrial emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG sources), but simultaneously the possibility was opened for compensating these emissions by afforestation and reforestation (GHG sinks). Because re-forestation would be senseless without also accounting for ‘de-forestation’ (to prevent a country from first cutting its forest and then claiming the subsequent reforestation as a climate mitigation activity) all three activities have to be “measured as verifiable changes in carbon stocks” whereas the GHG fluxes “shall be reported in a transparent and verifiable manner” (art. 3.3. KP).

Art. 3.4. opens the possibility to include also other “human-induced activities … in the agricultural soils and the land-use change and forestry categories” taking into account “uncertainties, transparency in reporting, verifiability” and “the methodological work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC). In the first session of the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (Montreal 2005) these activities were specified under Decision 16/CMP.1 as “revegetation”, “forest management”, “cropland management” and “grazing land management”. Accounting these activities is – in contrast to afforestation, reforestation and deforestation – not mandatory, but voluntary. The Kyoto Protocol is primarily “activity-based”, but as activities are actually defined referring to land categories (e.g. cropland management applies to land on which agricultural crops are grown), some elements of a ‘land-based’ approach are implicit. If one of the above categories is chosen, however, all activities under that category have to be accounted. So if a country chooses ‘cropland management’ all activities on cropland have to be accounted. How this applies to the activity of ‘revegetation’ is unclear.

In Decision 17/CMP.1 the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol decided to “apply the good practice guidance for land use, land-use change and forestry, as developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”. These guidelines use Forest Land, Cropland, Grassland, Wetlands, Settlements, and Other Land as categories in a hierarchical order (cf. “Wetlands include any land that is covered or saturated by water for all or part of the year, and that does not fall into the Forest Land, Cropland, or Grassland categories”, i.e. wetlands is all land that is wet except when it is forest, cropland or grassland).

Measurable, reportable, verifiable

The first doubt to arise in the discussions on inclusion of peatland rewetting as a climate mitigation activity was whether emissions and emission reductions from peatland rewetting could be “reported in a transparent and verifiable manner” following “the methodological work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”. For that purpose we analysed the first question to conclude that sufficient methods are available and under development to allow a reliable reporting on GHG emissions from peatland (Joosten & Couwenberg 2009). A critical evaluation of the reporting of 10 European countries (Barthelmes et al. 2009) revealed some important gaps and inaccuracies but also showed that– with good will and good guidance – it is very well possible to report emissions from peatlands reliably. An analysis of the IPCC default values on GHG emissions from organic soils (Couwenberg 2009a) showed that several of the default values should be modified in the light of latest scientific insights.

Peatland and land use categories

The second question was under which categories “rewetting” should be classified. A first – simple – idea was to add a new land use category “Peatland”. This would, however, mean changing some basic UNFCCC/IPCC philosophies and everybody is reluctant to address the basics under international conventions. It would furthermore be inaccurate, because peatland is in fact no land use category but a cross-cutting phenomenon. Peatland is land with a specific type of soil/substrate of which the properties are so dominant and conspicuous that the peat becomes eponymous for the landscape in which it occurs. Forest land, cropland, grassland, and wetland may all be peatland. Within their UNFCCC reporting countries have to (but not always do…) distinguish between areas on peat and areas on mineral soil. This is correct, because the presence or absence of peat on a site assigned to a category has enormous consequences for its greenhouse gas emissions:

• Peatlands contain an enormous soil carbon stock, which is mobilised through drainage and emitted as CO₂ over a (very) long time span.
• Peatlands maintain, under drained conditions, such soil humidity that optimal conditions for nitrous oxide production easily and frequently occur. As a result N₂O emissions from drained peatland are – with the same nitrogen availability – considerably higher than those from mineral soils.
• Peatlands have originated because wet, anaerobic conditions hampered decomposition of organic matter. These are the same conditions under which methane is generated. Peat soils may therefore under wet conditions emit substantial volumes of CH₄.

As GHG emissions from drained peatland may be substantial under each category, it would be useful to allow “peatland rewetting” as eligible activity in every category. This is indeed largely possible under the current Kyoto Protocol: countries can rewet their grassland on drained peat soil and account the reduced emissions. But this can not be done selectively: if countries want to account for rewetting they have to choose the full category and all activities within this category: not only rewetting, but also draining, ploughing, fertilizing and all actions that influence the greenhouse gas emissions not only from peat soils, but from mineral soils as well. This rule is to prevent “cherry picking”: only choosing the positive and ‘forgetting’ the negative activities.

In Kyoto Protocol practice countries flinch from electing the categories cropland and grasslands, because of the extra inventory and reporting efforts and the unpredictability of the results. So “peatland rewetting” on cropland and grassland would have little chance as long as the accounting of these categories is not mandatory. Peatland rewetting of “Wetland” (under which also peatlands, such as peat extraction sites, are classified) does not bring anything yet, because activities under the category “Wetlands” are not eligible for accounting under the current Kyoto Protocol.

Wetland rewetting

The alternative discussed in Bonn is to restrict the activity “rewetting” to the category “Wetlands” in the follow-up of the current Kyoto Protocol after 2012 (where mandatory accounting of all categories still seems beyond reach). This would thus imply that ‘wetland management’ (or whatever it may be called) becomes – next to forest management, cropland management and grassland management – an eligible activity under the Kyoto Protocol, but restricted to the category “Wetlands”.

Following the philosophy of the UNFCCC, the category “Wetlands” should only encompass managed wetlands, i.e. those wetlands that are being managed or of which former management (especially drainage) still defines their current GHG fluxes. It should be noted that pristine wetlands lack anthropogenic greenhouse gas fluxes and thus need not be reported under UNFCCC. Pristine wetlands thus do not fall under the category ‘Wetlands’, but under un-managed = ‘non-categorized’ land, where land use is limited to hunting/gathering. The limitation of the activity ‘rewetting’ to the category ‘Wetlands’ would imply that the rewetting of peatlands under other categories (Forest land, Cropland, Grassland) requires an administrative transfer of the involved lands to the category ‘Wetlands’ (i.e. to the subcategory ‘drained wetland’). Also the accounting of the emissions from these areas prior to rewetting (i.e. in the KP baseline year 1990) should then be transferred to the latter category. This seems to be feasible. Assigning all land to be rewetted to one land use category (“Wetland”) is also consistent with the observation that water level is a better predictor for GHG emissions from peatland than type of land use.

The subcategory ‘drained peatland’ under “Wetlands” would also create a refuge for peatlands that were Cropland or Grassland but have been abandoned, a situation that is common all over the world. These abandoned peatlands often disappear from the accounting and are not reported because they are considered ‘un-managed’ (Barthelmes et al. 2009), although – without rewetting – their emissions may remain as high as when they were still used as and were still assigned to Cropland/Grassland.

The ‘balance’: rewetting versus drainage

Within the Kyoto Protocol there is an increasing attention for “balance”: if climatically positive activities are accounted, also their negative counterparts must be reported. This means: next to ‘re-forestation’ also ‘de-forestation’, next to ‘revegetation’ also ‘de-vegetation’, next to ‘re-wetting’ also ‘drainage’. With respect to ‘peatland rewetting’ this implies that (with a baseline 1990) every land (both under the categories and in the non-categorized lands) that has been drained after 1990 (i.e. of which the water level has been artificially lowered) must be assigned to the subcategory ‘drained wetland’ under the category ‘wetland’, whatever its actual land use (forestry, agriculture) is. This to prevent that – similar to the de-/re-forestation example above – countries would rewet areas they just had drained. The areas concerned can easily be assessed with archival satellite imagery. In practise this will be a very limited area, because in all UNFCC Annex I countries hardly any new areas of wetlands/peatlands have been drained after 1990. The only exception might be peat extraction, but this activity already is subsumed under the category “Wetlands”.

‘Rewetting’ versus ‘flooded land’

The phrasing of the activity as ‘rewetting’ implies that it deals about lands that were ‘wet’, subsequently have been drained, and now are made wet again. Rewetting refers to the most important variable for GHG emissions from wetland: the water level. Rewetting is furthermore a clearer term than ‘restoration’, because the latter requires much more specification (and thus creates more ambiguity). What aspect of a Wetland would you want to restore: hydrology, flora, fauna, biomass, ecosystem services, landscape? Rewetting relates to Wetland like Reforestation to Forest (you wouldn’t call reforestation ‘forest restoration’) similarly to how deforestation relates to drainage.

Areas that are flooded but have never been drained do not comply with the activity ‘rewetting’, because there is no return to a previous situation: there is no ‘re-’ involved.

Also areas that have been drained but have been flooded to the extent that the mean water level to the surface and the water level fluctuations by far exceed that of the area before drainage, do not comply with this activity. This thus excludes the subcategory ‘flooded land’ (i.e. reservoirs for hydro-electricity, drinking water etc.). This might be politically interesting because several countries are very afraid of having to report and account their huge methane emissions from hydro-electricity reservoirs. Another option is to remove such reservoirs from the Wetlands’ category and bring them under ‘Other Land Use’, or to account the methane losses from hydro-electricity reservoirs in a life-cycle-approach under the ‘Energy’ sector.

Methane

Peatland rewetting is an effective way of reducing the emissions of CO₂ and N₂O substantially, but revives the CH₄ emissions. In cases that abundant fresh biomass is flooded, CH₄ emissions may even increase to such an extent that the climate effect of CO₂ and N₂O emission reduction is temporarily annihilated. On the mid- and long-term, however, rewetting of peatlands always leads to a substantial net reduction of climate relevant emissions from the peat body compared with the drained baseline.

Several countries in the Bonn meetings expressed doubt whether methane could be adequately addressed. This point was addressed by Belarus in an intervention during the last session of the AWG-KPLULUCF that follows literally:

“Belarus would like to react on the correct observation of Brazil, Japan and China in our last meeting that rewetting of drained /wetland/peatland is complicated by failing IPCC guidance on methane.

This lack of guidance in the 2006 Guidelines can easily be explained. Addressing methane from peatlands was not opportune, because pristine peatlands do produce methane, but are irrelevant under UNFCCC, whereas drained peatlands don’t emit methane.

Peatland rewetting, however, produces anthropogenic CH₄, next to suppressing CO₂ and N₂O emissions. Only in its 4^th Assessment (2007) IPCC recognized that drained peatlands are responsible for over 25% of the emissions from land use. This makes peatland rewetting an important mitigation option and the lack of CH₄ guidance a gap that urgently needs to be

filled. This is not that difficult:

• Methane has been addressed in various IPCC guidance (rice, biomass burning, livestock, waste);
• There are much more data on CH₄ than on CO₂ and N₂O, simply because it is easier to measure. We understand by now the major mechanisms behind CH₄ emission;
• Recently high quality reviews have been published, both for the tropics and for the boreal/temporal zones, covering almost all relevant peatland areas of the world;
• An overview of the state-of-the art is given in a recent Wetlands International report (Couwenberg 2009b).

Therefore Belarus proposes to invite the IPCC to complete its 2006 guidelines urgently, e.g. by producing an addendum, to fill this important gap and to enable a mitigation option that can be beneficially applied in many countries of the world.”

Carbon stock changes versus GHG fluxes

Related to the fear for methane was the proposal of some countries in the Bonn II meeting (June 2009) to limit the reporting/accounting of ‘wetland management’ to carbon stock changes and not to include greenhouse gas fluxes. This with the idea that – similar to forests – the major GHG fluxes can be addressed by accounting for carbon stock changes only and that methane is too difficult to be addressed. The first misconception we have refuted in Barthelmes et al. (2009). In peatlands a stock-change approach is not feasible, because of the enormous stocks involved. A drained peatland in the temperate zone easily loses 25 tons of CO₂ per hectare and year from peat oxidation, even in absence of fire, in the tropics 2-3 times more. Even such huge amounts (7-20 tons of Carbon per ha and year) can hardly be assessed in a stock-based approach, because the change is smaller than the error in determining the total soil carbon stock (that may amount to several thousands of tons per ha). Furthermore a stock change approach does not adequately consider the methane problem. Neglecting methane would substantially overestimate the emission advantages from peatland rewetting and thus create ‘hot air’: emission reductions that only exist on paper but can be used to compensate real emission increases elsewhere. More of such ‘hot air’ is not something the world is waiting for…

For these reasons emissions from organic soils should not be assessed via stock changes but directly via emissions. This conclusion is also drawn by the IPCC in its 2006 Guidelines.

The way ahead

The current “Options and proposals on how to address definitions, modalities, rules and guidelines for the treatment of land use, land-use change and forestry” formulated before the Bonn III meetings illustrate the above mentioned discussions. We find under definitions:

[[“Wetland] [“Peatland] management” is a system of practices for stewardship and use of [wetlands] [peatlands] that have an effect on [greenhouse gas emissions and removals] [carbon stock changes], including drainage of [wetlands] [peatlands] and restoration of drained [wetlands] [peatlands];]

For KP Article 3, paragraph 4 is proposed: 6.

[Prior to the start of the second commitment period [and, where relevant, any subsequent commitment period],] a Party included in Annex I [may choose to] [shall] account for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks resulting from [any or all of] the following human-induced activities, other than afforestation, reforestation, deforestation[, and any activity under Article 3, paragraph 4, elected in the first commitment period (If rules change substantially this may need to be reconsidered)]: [revegetation [, devegetation]], [forest management,] cropland management, grazing land management, [[wetland][peatland] management] [harvested wood product management]].

Under “B. Accounting rules for greenhouse gas emissions and removals” currently two options exist:

Option 1: For the purpose of accounting greenhouse gas emissions and removals from land use, land-use change and forestry, a Party shall account for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks on forest land, cropland, grassland, wetlands and settlements as well as greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks resulting from land-use changes from the land-use categories forest land, cropland, grassland, wetlands or settlements to any other land-use category.

This option thus proposes to make (almost) all land use and land use changes mandatory. Option 2 proposes only to make Forest Land mandatory and to keep (Cropland, Grassland) or make (Wetlands, Settlements) eligible.

Next to the Kyoto Protocol peatlands have also been discussed under the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) mechanism, where the big discussion is whether soil (peat) carbon should be considered as an integral part of the forest carbon or not. Parallel to the REDD mechanism (where peat swamps could be covered) also first discussions have been taking place about a possible instrument to protect the carbon stocks of nonforested peatlands. More about that in the next IMCG Newsletter.

After the informal Bonn III meetings, the next round of climate discussions in Bangkok (28 September – 9 October) and Barcelona (2 – 6 November) will be again official sessions. Hopefully there clear and good rules for including peatlands in the UNFCCC climate mitigation package will emerge. We will be there to get the best possible result.

References

Barthelmes A, Couwenberg J, Joosten H (2009) Peatlands in National Inventory Submissions 2009 – An analysis of 10 European countries. Wetlands International, Ede. download paper

Couwenberg J (2009a) Emission factors for managed peat soils - An analysis of IPCC default values. Wetlands International, Ede. download paper

Couwenberg J (2009b) Methane emissions from peat soils (organic soils, histosols) - Facts, MRV-ability, emission factors. Wetlands International, Ede. download paper

Joosten H, Couwenberg J (2009) Are emission reductions from peatlands MRV-able? Wetlands International, Ede. download paper