LIFE supports peatland restoration and climate action across Europe

The second Power to the Peatlands conference, held in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, from 2-4 September, brought together peatland practitioners, policymakers, researchers and land managers. Around 564 people participated across the two days, while more than 200 followed online.

Under the theme ‘Back to the Future: imagining tomorrow, acting today’, the conference highlighted how peatland restoration is moving from planning to implementation across Europe. LIFE Multi Peat and Interreg ADMIRE were among the organising projects, alongside Natuurmonumenten, Radboud University, Natuurpunt and other peatland organisations.

Restoring peatlands in practice

The LIFE projects featured throughout the conference, showed how peatland restoration is already being delivered on the ground, providing practical examples that can help accelerate implementation elsewhere. LIFE Multi Peat, for example, is restoring and rewetting degraded peatlands in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Poland while monitoring their impact on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and enhancing biodiversity. In Ireland alone, restoration is under way across 217 hectares, including the closure of more than 6 000 drainage ditches at a site in Galway.

LIFE PeatCarbon brought further experience from Latvia and Finland, where the project is already restoring degraded raised bogs by blocking drainage ditches to raise water levels, helping vegetation recover and reducing carbon emissions. It also uses remote sensing and monitoring to track changes in hydrology, vegetation and greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, Peat Pals for LIFE is restoring degraded peat ecosystems in the Netherlands and Flanders, including improving the hydrology of peatland habitats. Alongside restoration and greenhouse-gas monitoring, the project is exploring financing approaches that could help replicate and scale up successful measures elsewhere in Europe.

Supporting Europe’s restoration goals

In total, over ten LIFE projects contributed to sessions and poster presentations at Power to the Peatlands 2026. Their work demonstrated how peatland restoration can simultaneously support biodiversity recovery, climate mitigation and climate resilience, while generating practical knowledge that can help scale up restoration efforts across Europe.

This also builds on more than three decades of LIFE support for peatlands. Speaking at the conference, Hans Rhein, Head of CINEA’s LIFE Energy and Climate Unit, noted that since 1992 around 400 LIFE projects have supported peatland-related activities, including approximately 120 focused exclusively on peatlands. As Rhein told participants: “LIFE is a unique EU funding instrument because it translates policy objectives into practical solutions on the ground.”