That matters because the big challenge in peatland finance is not proving that restoration has value. It clearly does. The challenge is translating that value into revenues that are sufficiently durable, measurable and contractable to support serious private investment.

Carbon has been the obvious starting point. And rightly so. Restored peatlands can generate very significant emissions reductions, and carbon remains the most developed route to monetisation.

But carbon has limitations. Prices can be volatile. Demand can be policy-constrained. Market confidence can move around. And in some peatland archetypes, carbon on its own is not enough to produce investable returns.

Water markets could be different. When peatlands are restored, they can improve raw water quality, reduce dissolved organic carbon and sediment loads, attenuate flood peaks, store water in the landscape, improve drought resilience, and reduce downstream treatment or asset-maintenance costs.

In other words, the benefits are often local, physical and economically legible.

And crucially, they accrue to identifiable counterparties: water utilities, flood authorities, infrastructure operators, regulators, insurers, and in some cases large corporates with meaningful water exposure.

That opens up a very different commercial possibility: long-term offtake-style contracts for water system services.

The basic proposition is that peatlands and other nature-based solutions should increasingly be understood as distributed hydrological infrastructure.

That may sound abstract, but I think it is actually very practical. In energy, markets evolved from paying only for one-way electricity output to also paying for system services: capacity, flexibility and resilience. The same broad shift is possible in water.

So instead of only valuing grey assets and volumetric supply, we could begin to value the system services that restored landscapes provide:

• capacity-style payments for maintaining flood storage or drought-buffering capacity
• outcome-linked payments when landscapes perform during extreme events
• hybrid models that combine an availability payment with a performance payment

That kind of architecture could be transformational for peatlands. For one thing, it would start to create the kind of stable cashflow profile that project finance (a multi-trillion dollar asset class) models need.

To be clear, this will not happen automatically. We still need better product definitions, better MRV, clearer attribution methods, stronger valuation frameworks and workable contract design. We need buyers willing to engage commercially, not just conceptually. And we need regulators and public bodies to help create the conditions for these markets to emerge with integrity.

But the prize is large.

If carbon is the currency of climate mitigation, water may increasingly become the currency of climate adaptation and resilience. That feels especially relevant for peatlands, because they sit right at the intersection of climate, water and nature recovery.

For years, peatlands have often been seen as a specialist conservation issue. Whilst they are certainly this, they might be better understood as strategic natural infrastructure. And if we get the water market architecture right, that shift could materially change the pace at which restoration gets financed.

I would love to hear from people working in water utilities, insurance, catchment management, infrastructure and regulation on whether this resonates — and what would need to happen first to make it real.