This tiny plant has a big impact on peat bogs’ ability to store carbon (Image: Image Broker/Rex Features)

“Save the bogs” isn’t as catchy as “save the whales”, but the cause is just as worthwhile. UK peat bogs damaged by 150 years of pollution are to be restored with a scattering of tiny mosses. The rebuilt bogs should improve water quality and could slow climate change. In the future, they might even be used to geoengineer a cooler climate by storing carbon dioxide.

Peat bogs depend on a protective layer of sphagnum moss that traps the peat layers, as well as providing the raw material for new peat. But air pollution since the industrial revolution has killed much of the UK’s sphagnum, leaving bare expanses of decomposing black peat that pollute water supplies and release carbon dioxide, accelerating climate change.

On 24 and 25 September, volunteers from the Moors for the Future Partnership scattered 150 million gel beads onto damaged UK peat. Each bead contained a tiny sphagnum plant, which should colonise the peat and begin restoring the protective cover.


Climate time bomb

The world’s peat bogs are a climate time bomb waiting to go off: they store about 455 gigatonnes of carbon, and are releasing increasing amounts. But according to Chris Freeman of Bangor University, UK, we could turn that around. Peat bogs could be used to geoengineer the climate by removing carbon dioxide from the air.

Freeman is trying to develop a genetically modified sphagnum that could boost the amount of carbon stored in peat. Sphagnum naturally produces phenolic compounds that slow the decomposition of the plants that make up peat. Preventing peat decomposition will help keep the carbon it holds locked away. Freeman wants to create a sphagnum that overproduces phenolics, slowing peat decomposition even further.

Freeman says the genetically modified sphagnum could store enough carbon each year to offset global transportation emissions. It will take at least 10 years to develop the modified plant (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, DOI: doi.org/jd3).

It’s a promising idea, not least because it also restores habitats and improves water quality, says Tim Kruger of the Oxford Geoengineering Programme at the University of Oxford. “What’s important is to understand how long the carbon is stored,” he says. If the changing climate causes the peat to decompose, the carbon dioxide will escape again.

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