Strategic wetland restoration for optimizing ecosystem services and climate impact

Wetland restoration holds great potential as a nature-based solution to water quality, flood risk, and climate change; however carbon balance is not often considered in restoration prioritization. Spatial heterogeneity in wetland carbon sequestration and methane emissions potential leads to locations that are more or less favorable for restoration with respect to climate outcomes. Given widespread investments in wetland restoration, there is an urgent need to prioritize locations and practices that lead to the largest climate benefit, as well as synergies with other co-benefits. Using peatlands as a case study, we investigate the climate impact of different restoration prioritization strategies. We find strategic restoration of 30% of the world’s drained peatlands prioritizing GHG emissions reductions, would sequester 0.54 ± 0.20 Pg CO2eq. yr-1 more than the same magnitude of restoration conducted randomly. Meeting a 30% restoration target while prioritizing water quality improvements or flood risk mitigation is still beneficial for the climate, resulting in net emissions reductions of 0.32 ± 0.15 and 0.48 ± 0.19 Pg CO2eq. yr-1, respectively, and demonstrates opportunities for overlap between restoration objectives. We use spatially explicit projections of increasing wetland methane emissions due to climate change to account for methane emission growth by 2100. Our work highlights numerous opportunities for peatland restoration to simultaneously achieve both near- and long-term climate change mitigation as well as provide local-to-regional scale ecosystem services.

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Primary Presenter: Emily Ury, Environmental Defense Fund (ury.emily@gmail.com)

Authors:

Emily Ury, Environmental Defense Fund  (ury.emily@gmail.com)

Zhen Zhang, National Tibetan Plateau Data Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences  (yuisheng@gmail.com)

Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland  (etienne.fluet@gmail.com)

Stephane Sartzetakis, Environmental Defense Fund  (ssartzetakis@edf.org)

Tianyi Sun, Environmental Defense Fund  (tsun@edf.org)

Brian Buma, Environmental Defense Fund  (bbuma@edf.org)