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Cultivating the climate: socio-economic prospects and consequences of climate-friendly peat land management in Germany

  • Wetland Restoration
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Abstract

About 30% of the world’s soil carbon is stored in peat soils. Peat land’s functional principle of carbon storage greatly depends on management strategies. Therefore, agricultural peat land use becomes a focal point of interest in the current debate on climate protection. Agricultural management demands a drawdown of the water-level that causes degradation of the soils, as well as trace-gas emissions which have a negative impact on greenhouse-gas balance. Climate-friendly peat land management strategies, however, demand enhanced groundwater tables and decreased land-use intensity. Against this background, we analyse ways of re-organising agricultural peat land use within a case study located in Germany, where intensive peat land use accounts for 2.3–5.1% of the country’s overall greenhouse-gas emission. The study takes place in six regions which represent all possible socio-economic and natural conditions with regard to the range of existing peat land types, range of management and cultivation types, as well as the range of land-use intensity. To analyse potentials and effects of re-organising peat land use, stakeholder workshops and extensive farm surveys were carried out. The results indicate that reservations exist as regards a re-organisation of peat land management. Financial compensation for farmers appears necessary. The results also show that the potential of rearrangement throughout the regions varies significantly, mainly according to the existing level of interconnection and cooperation between local stakeholders, the technical feasibility of restoration and water logging and the level of agricultural profitability of peat land cultivation with regard to income, capital commitment and the share of affected peat land area.

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Notes

  1. Byrne et al. (2004) used a conservative estimate by taking the median of measured data, as the probability-density-function of the data is often positively skewed and the mean would therefore overestimate emissions due to few extremely high data points.

  2. Calculated without CO2-C .

  3. Mainly data on boreal soils, lack of data on CO2 fluxes in restored fens.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been granted by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ 01LS05047).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Agricultural and Forestry Economics, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Feistmantelstr. 4, 1180, Vienna, Austria

    Lena Schaller & Jochen Kantelhardt

  2. Department of Ecology and Ecosystem-Management, Technical University of Munich, Emil-Ramann-Str. 6, 85350, Freising, Germany

    Matthias Drösler

Authors
  1. Lena Schaller
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  2. Jochen Kantelhardt
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  3. Matthias Drösler
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Correspondence to Lena Schaller.

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Guest editors: Dominik Zak, Robert McInnes, Jörg Gelbrecht / Restoration, biogeochemistry and ecological services of wetlands

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Schaller, L., Kantelhardt, J. & Drösler, M. Cultivating the climate: socio-economic prospects and consequences of climate-friendly peat land management in Germany. Hydrobiologia 674, 91–104 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-011-0736-y

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