Landscape Finance Lab and partners collaborate to publish new Investing in Peatlands Guide
On Thursday 18th January, we co-launched the Investing In Peatlands publication in collaboration with 14 leading global and European climate, conservation and finance organisations.
The publication, Investing in Peatlands, is a comprehensive guide for nature-focused investors seeking peatland opportunities and sets out recommendations for growing the emerging peatland finance industry. Despite healthy peatlands being our planet’s most concentrated, space-efficient, natural carbon stores and sinks, they have over time, been chronically undervalued.
This report comes at a critical time, as it is an important piece to the puzzle, preparing us to mitigate and navigate the climate crisis (and other compounding crisis) we currently face.
A high percentage of peatlands are in a degraded state, but restoration can reverse this. Therefore, we need more private investment in peatlands to access all the co-benefits that they provide. This report will be useful in helping investors to understand the role that they can play in restoring and protecting these crucial landscapes.
Published by the Landscape Finance Lab, Climate Catalyst and the EU Horizon 2020 WaterLANDS project, it brings together contributions from partners spearheading landscape-scale peatland restoration projects and investments across the UK and Europe.
Current peatland investments tend to be small, but case studies featured throughout the report showcase how investing in this nascent asset class provides investors with a unique opportunity to deliver financial returns from rapidly developing carbon, biodiversity and water markets, whilst supporting a range of meaningful co-benefits including climate resilience, nature regeneration, green business and job creation, and enhanced cultural and leisure amenities for communities - all at landscape-scale.
During the 75-minute launch webinar, experts from across the finance and conservation sector discussed the various peatland-focused investment challenges, alongside the growing opportunities which are highlighted in the report itself. The Flow Country Green Finance Initiative (Ireland), WaterLANDS (Scotland) and the toMOORow Initiative (Germany), who are leading examples of landscape-scale peatland restoration projects, also shared how they approach public and private financing through a blended finance model and develop value chains to generate economic, environmental and social returns in their communities.
Dr Shane McGuiness, Co-Cordinator of the WaterLANDS project, closed the launch with a rallying call to investors, reminding them that "this is not simply the communication of a report". He went on to urge them to be part of the solution for the right reasons, to familiarise themselves with the sector and to be brave and lean into this process of actively co-developing the sector alongside scientists, project developers, community leads and policy makers.
