A week on from the launch of Financing European Peatlands, I’ve been reflecting on the conversations it sparked.

What encouraged me most was that the discussion quickly moved beyond “is peatland restoration important?” and onto the much more useful question: what would it actually take to make this investable and scalable?

That is really the heart of the report.

The diagnosis is relatively simple. Europe’s peatlands are hugely important climate, water and biodiversity assets. Some restoration models already look commercially credible. But the market still does not work well enough to bring in repayable capital at the scale required.

Generalising only slightly, much restoration activity is fragmented, bespoke and grant-led. Revenues are uncertain. Too few projects are aggregated in a way that banks, funds or institutional investors can really engage with. And project-finance structures — which transformed other infrastructure sectors — have barely arrived yet.

So the report is deliberately action-oriented. It sets out not just why peatlands matter, but what different parts of the market need to do next.

For me, there are three system shifts that matter most:

First, revenues need to be diversified and stabilised. Carbon remains crucial. But carbon alone is unlikely to be enough across all peatland archetypes. We need stronger and more transparent carbon markets, and we need to bring water benefits — and over time biodiversity benefits — into forms that are measurable, contractable and financeable.  

Second, aggregation has to become normal. One of the big barriers is not just revenue risk, but size. Institutional capital does not want to underwrite hundreds of tiny bespoke transactions one by one. We need catchment-scale, landscape-scale and portfolio-scale vehicles that can bundle projects, diversify risk and create something investable.  

Third, the sector needs to start moving towards project finance. That means ring-fenced vehicles, clearer contractual allocation of risk, more predictable revenues, and eventually the use of both equity and debt capital — not just grants and developer balance sheets.

The roadmap then breaks actions down by stakeholder group.

Standards-setters and registry stewards can improve transparency, interoperability and integrity.

Corporate buyers and infrastructure operators can move from one-off purchases or CSR-style support towards longer-term offtake arrangements for carbon, water and resilience outcomes.

Public bodies can do far more to shape markets — not just by issuing grants, but by supporting revenue stabilisation, market rules and enabling regulation.

Project developers can push aggregation harder, design for stacked or bundled revenue streams from the outset, and work together on investor engagement.

And investors themselves can begin treating peatlands not as a novelty, but as part of the broader evolution of natural capital into a real allocation class.

One practical idea I’m especially interested in is whether this now needs a formal Peatland Finance Roadmap Action Group: a place where the relevant market participants can coordinate delivery against the roadmap, rather than leaving this as a good report that everyone politely agrees with and then files away.

Because the real test now is implementation.

If we are serious about peatlands, we need to be serious about market design, commercial structures and long-term execution. Not instead of ecology and public purpose — but in service of them.

Thanks again to everyone who joined the launch and who has read, challenged, shared and improved the thinking.