Vienna, 26 March 2026 - Today the Landscape Finance Lab publishes Financing European Peatlands: A Roadmap towards an institutional asset class, a major new discussion paper setting out how the restoration of Europe’s peatlands — one of the continent’s most powerful yet under-financed nature-based solutions — can be structured to attract institutional private capital at scale.

The report finds that more than €2 billion of private investment is realistically achievable within the next decade, an amount well beyond the capacity of public grants and philanthropy alone.  

Key points:

• On a conservative basis, 1.1 million hectares of peatlands across eight key European ‘peatland archetypes’ [see Notes to Editors] in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Scandinavia are feasibly restorable in the next decade under current policy frameworks 
• Over 300 million tonnes of CO₂e in lifetime emissions reductions are achievable — equivalent to removing approximately 1.3 million passenger cars from Europe’s roads permanently
• A project-level financial return of approximately 7% per annum makes peatland restoration a potential fit with institutional investor allocations  
• Fenland and polder restoration in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and Poland already shows project-level economics that are investable today

The investment case: why peatlands, why now?

Peatlands cover approximately 5–6% of continental Europe’s land area — an area the size of France — yet at least one quarter are degraded, turning them from carbon sinks into major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The report identifies the financing challenge as structural rather than ecological or even economic: the science and delivery capacity exist, but the financial architecture to mobilise private capital at scale does not.

The analysis shows that the binding constraints are not primarily about returns — some peatland archetypes already generate project-level internal rates of return above 7% on carbon revenues alone — but about three structural bottlenecks: revenue instability and weak bankability; lack of aggregation at investable scale; and the absence of project-finance structures that can unlock lower-cost debt capital.

Water benefits: the missing revenue anchor

A central finding of the report is the transformative potential of water-related revenues. Restored peatlands deliver improved water quality (reducing dissolved organic carbon and colour loads), lower flood risk, improved drought resilience, and reduced erosion — benefits that accrue directly to identifiable local counterparties including water utilities, infrastructure operators, regulators, and insurers.

Unlike carbon credits, which are traded in relatively abstract and volatile voluntary markets, water benefits can be contracted directly with buyers on long-term, outcomes-based agreements, based on avoiding costs these buyers already incur. The report proposes a framework of standardised Water Quality Units, Flood Attenuation Units, Drought Resilience Units, and Sediment Avoidance Units to underpin investable water benefit markets — and shows that in some UK catchment contexts for instance, water payments alone could add £40–£400 per hectare per year to project / property revenues.

The Roadmap: five stakeholder groups, one decade

The report sets out a ten-year sequenced Roadmap for development of a private investment market for peatland restoration, with specific actions for:

• Standards-setters and registries: to improve transparency, harmonise European methodologies and enable interoperability.
• Corporate and infrastructure buyers: to move from discretionary grant programmes and spot purchases to long-term offtake agreements for carbon, water, and biodiversity services.
• Project developers: to design for water benefits from the outset, aggregate projects into landscape-scale portfolios, and pioneer project-finance structures.
• Governments and public bodies: to shift fiscal support from one-off capital grants toward revenue stabilisation tools such as carbon price floors and Contracts for Difference, while continuing to fund enabling science and MRV.
• Investors and asset managers: to engage early — beginning with specialist natural capital funds and development bank co-investment, progressing to infrastructure-style debt and institutional pension allocations.

Peatlands in the Natural Capital portfolio

The report positions peatland restoration as a complementary allocation within diversified natural capital and net-zero portfolios. Compared with afforestation, peatlands deliver earlier climate benefits — emissions reductions begin within one to three years of rewetting rather than waiting for biomass accumulation. Compared with engineered carbon removals such as direct air capture, peatlands deliver at a fraction of the cost — typically tens of euros per tonne of CO₂e rather than hundreds — while generating significant material co-benefits in water and biodiversity that engineered technologies cannot replicate.

NOTES TO EDITORS

About the report: Financing European Peatlands: A Roadmap towards an institutional asset class was authored by Matt Robinson (Senior Finance Adviser) and Gokul Ganesh (Researcher) at the Landscape Finance Lab. Research was carried out in late 2025 and published March 2026. The report draws on a literature review, targeted interviews with key market participants, and a bespoke database of over 400 European peatland restoration projects.

About peatland archetypes: To conduct the economic and financial analysis underpinning this report, the authors constructed eight key peatland archetypes: UK blanket bogs, UK fenlands, Irish blanket bogs, Dutch fenland/polders, German fenland/polders, Polish fenland/polders, Scandinavian boreal aapa mires and Scandinavian forested peatlands. These are a combination of jurisdiction (as they pertain to markets for ecosystem services), location and peatland habitat type.The eight archetypes are a sub-set of European peatlands as a whole, several of which are not therefore covered by the analysis in this report. The omission of other European peatland types is not a reflection on their ecological or economic importance. 

About the Landscape Finance Lab: The Landscape Finance Lab, is an independent not-for-profit organisation working to mobilise private finance for landscape restoration and Nature-based Solutions. With deep roots in the peatland sector since 2016, it has facilitated a UK & Ireland Peatland Finance Community of Practice, incubated Peatland Finance Ireland and the Flow Country Partnership’s Green Finance Initiative, and supported the Great North Bog landscape as part of the EU Horizon WaterLANDS project.

Funding: This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101036484 (WaterLANDS). This output reflects the views of the authors and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Financing European Peatlands is supported by: European Investment Bank and the Global Peatlands Initiative.

The Peatland Breakthrough: This paper has been developed as a contribution to the resource mobilisation target of the Peatland Breakthrough. The Peatland Breakthrough is a global call to action led by Wetlands International, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Greifswald Mire Centre, developed in close alignment with the Global Peatlands Initiative, and in collaboration with the Convention on Wetlands and the Marrakech Partnership.

Suggested citation: Robinson, M. and Ganesh, G. (2026): Financing European Peatlands: A Roadmap towards an institutional asset class. Landscape Finance Lab, Vienna.

MEDIA CONTACTS

For press enquiries, interview requests 

Matt Robinson, Lead Author — matt@landscapelab.org

Sabrina Russo, Landscape Finance Lab Communications — sabrina@landscapelab.org