Water-based solutions for carbon storage, people and wilderness
Wetlands are essential for the health of the planet and its wildlife. They retain and purify water, store carbon, are home to wildlife, and benefit communities.
However, wetland sites across Europe have been severely damaged by human activity and climate change.
WaterLANDS (Water-based solutions for carbon storage, people and wilderness) is a €23.6 million, 5-year EU-funded project that will restore wetland sites across Europe. It aims to lay the foundations for building knowledge and resources to protect them across much wider areas.
"For the UK, peatlands are our main land-based carbon store and we must do all we can to protect and enhance them. This will enable us to reduce flood risk from the uplands, improve water quality and take carbon out of the atmosphere.
"Sharing best practice and knowledge between Ireland and the UK on peatland restoration is hugely important and enables more efficient and cutting-edge advancement in protecting our environment and supporting livelihoods."
– Professor Joseph Holden, University of Leeds
Watch the YouTube summaryImpact
- International collaboration: partnerships across Europe involving academics, practitioners, government, and communities to tackle wetland degradation
- Knowledge discovery: shared learning between sites enables a joined-up, evidence-led approach to wetland restoration
- Climate change and sustainability: improving the health of wetlands across Europe will benefit biodiversity, increase carbon storage, and improve community wellbeing.
Key information
- Major funders: EU Horizon 2020 Green Deal Call 7.1
- Partners and collaborators include: University College Dublin, Landscape Finance Lab, Prospex Institute, Balkani Wildlife Society, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Bulgaria, Estonian Fund for Nature, Estonian State Forest Management Centre, Tootsi Turvas, Geological Survey of Finland, University of Tartu, University of Eastern Finland, Plan Bleu, Tour du Valat Fondation, Michael Succow Foundation, Community Wetlands Forum Ireland, ERINN Innovation, LIFE IP Wild Atlantic Nature, University of Galway, University of Venice, We are here Venice, Provincie Groningen, Radboud University Nijmegen, Staatsbosbeheer, Wageningen University, Wetlands International, Centrum Ochrony Mokradel (CMok), University of Warsaw, Estación Biológica de Doñana (CSIC), Uppsala University, IUCN UK Peatland Programme, Natural England, Wetlands International Europe Association, the Great North Bog Coalition.
- Disciplines: geography, soil science, water, social sciences, economics, public engagement
- Project lead: Dr Craig Bullock (University College Dublin).
- University of Leeds team: Professor Joseph Holden, Professor Julia Martin-Ortega, Dr Richard Grayson, Professor Pippa Chapman, Dr Paul Morris, Professor Andy Baird, Professor Lee Brown, Dr Joshua Cohen.
Restoring Europe’s wetlands
Wetlands include swamps, marshes, peatlands, floodplains and ponds.
They’re home to 40% of the world’s species, and contain diverse ecosystems. They store and capture carbon, remove environmental pollutants, and protect communities from flooding.
Europe has already lost up to 90% of its original wetlands, resulting in massive biodiversity loss, water and food shortages, devastating floods and fires, coastal subsidence and erosion.
WaterLANDS aims to rectify this with its large-scale, joined-up approach to restoration.
A joined-up approach
Wetland restoration is complex, and previous attempts have been too localised or fragmented to make a significant difference to the re-establishment of wetland ecosystems and species.
By engaging with local communities and stakeholders, WaterLANDS ensures that wetland restoration results not only in environmental gains but also in social and economic benefits for the communities involved.
Across Europe, WaterLANDS supports the hands-on restoration of wetland sites covering 10,500 hectares over six Action Sites in Estonia, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Bulgaria and the UK.
The Yorkshire Integrated Catchment Solutions Programme (iCASP) is supporting the Great North Bog coalition, which aims to restore all remaining degraded blanket peatlands across the North of England.
ICASP's team collaborates with practitioners across the six WaterLANDS Action Sites, sharing ideas and knowledge about their approaches to restore peatlands.
Through water@leeds, the group hosts one of 15 knowledge sites that uses experiences of working with wetlands to inform future restoration within the WaterLANDS project and beyond.
Great North Bog
The Great North Bog coalition brings together the North Pennines National Landscape team, Yorkshire Peat Partnership, Moors for the Future Partnership, Northumberland Peat Partnership, Cumbria Peat Partnership and Lancashire Peat Partnership to protect and restore northern England’s upland peatlands.
These include four National Parks and three National Landscapes. The site is home to around 92% of the upland peat in England, stores 400 million tonnes of carbon and supports a complex ecosystem.
The blanket bogs across the Great North Bog have been heavily degraded by human activity such as burning, artificial drainage, livestock grazing and afforestation.
Peatland restoration organisations are taking urgent action to conserve and restore our peatlands, contributing significantly to the UK’s climate and carbon sequestration targets.
Community engagement through citizen science
As well as collaborating with other institutions and experts, the restoration team engage local communities in their work in the peatlands.
Dr Antony Blundell led citizen science workshops in Northumberland, Cumbria and West Yorkshire, with around 80 members of local communities and organisations.
They discussed peatland’s history and how it’s managed, and learned how to take samples of peat.
The workshops helped the community members understand the history and importance of peatlands, while sharing the skills to collect peatland data, which helps to grow the network of information about the health of the peatlands.
Professor Julia Martin-Ortega, social sciences project lead for water@Leeds, at the University of Leeds, said: “What makes WaterLANDS different and more innovative than other programmes in this field is how it places communities and how they value wetlands at the core of its restoration.
“The importance of working with communities to shape and inform restoration action is recognised, and this highlights how any successful intervention requires interdisciplinary research, bringing together natural and social sciences, but also with input from stakeholders and members of the public.
“At the University of Leeds, both interdisciplinarity and working with communities are at the heart of how we see addressing major societal challenges such as the need to take care of wetlands.”
Developing a peatland data standard
Collecting and aggregating peatland data from multiple sources remains a persistent challenge across the sector. While most scientists and practitioners recognise the value of exchangeable peatland data, long-established workflows make change difficult.
This peatland community of practice met several times to tackle this problem. The team developed a draft peatland data standard and created a set of hashtags to 'tag' data, making it exchangeable without needing significant changes to how it is collected and processed. These are called Peatland Exchange Tags (PXT), after the Humanitarian Exchange Language on which it is based.
The team's main goal is to increase awareness and adoption of the data standard and PXT. As such, they run workshops in the UK and Europe over the summer, and have begun working closely with other peatland groups and organisations in Europe and Canada.
Keywords: climate change mitigation and adaptation