Peat - Blog Posts

For the Love of Peat: Our Best Defence Against a Changing Climate

Canada holds between a quarter and a third of the world’s peatlands. It’s time we took better care of them

Canada holds between a quarter and a third of the world’s peatlands, including acidic bogs and more alkaline fens as well as swamps and marshes. They can be found across the country, from British Columbia to the Northwest Territories to Nova Scotia, growing many metres deep into the ground. Due to their density of decomposed or decomposing plant material, one square metre of peatland in northern Canada holds approximately five times the amount of carbon as one square metre of tropical rainforest in the Amazon. But the country’s peatlands have been so degraded by the construction of mines and hydroelectric dams, by oil-and-gas developments, and by urban expansion that we are losing an ecosystem crucial to the prevention of natural disasters such as forest fires—as well as destroying a key mitigator of climate change.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Kyle Scott (kjscott.com).