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In 1986, Professor Edward Maltby published Waterlogged Wealth, a landmark synthesis on the immense but underappreciated benefits to human societies provided by wetlands and peatlands. Forty years ago, that message was both prescient and urgent. Today the scientific evidence supporting this view has only strengthened. Peatlands are now recognized as among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth, storing more carbon than global forests and representing one of the most cost-effective levers for climate change mitigation among all nature-based solutions.
Despite this longstanding knowledge and its more recent extension to climate regulation, peatlands remain dramatically underrepresented in global conservation frameworks. Just 17% of global peatland area currently falls within protected areas—a meager fraction compared to that of other high value ecosystems such as tropical forests, coral reefs, or mangroves. Most peatlands remain vulnerable to drainage, agricultural conversion, peat extraction, and infrastructure development, all of which convert them from carbon sinks into potent sources of greenhouse gases. A peatland degraded releases, within decades, carbon slowly accumulated over millennia.
We are amidst a peat carbon loss crisis, and yet, peatlands struggle to capture public and political attention. We argue that this is in no small part because they may lack the aesthetic intrigue that often catalyzes popular support for conservation. Peatlands are typically flattish, waterlogged environments, characterized by mosses or scrubby vegetation rather than towering trees or spectacular geological formations. Much of their ecological importance, and value to society, lies largely below the surface, hidden from the human eye, in the slow accumulation of partially decomposed organic matter over civilizational timescales. Although some peatlands are extremely beautiful, they rarely fit the awe-inspiring aesthetic that drives decisions to designate national parks and other protected areas.
To improve their conservation outcomes, we argue that peatlands would benefit from having emblematic mascots. Efforts by international initiatives such as the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands have worked for decades to burnish the image of peatlands. Yet the conservation reality suggests that these efforts have only partially succeeded. A mismatch between ecological importance and conservation priority persists that geophysical research alone has not been able to bridge4. The plight of peatlands stems not from a lack of scientific understanding of their importance, but rather, at least in part, a challenge of capturing public imagination.
The idea of animal mascots for peatlands follows the well-worn path of the flagship species concept conservation strategy that has successfully guided the establishment of protected areas around the banner of iconic and charismatic megafauna. The approach leverages social preferences, that are unevenly distributed across taxa and landscape types, to target conservation action. Peatlands are ecological treasures that rarely advertise themselves. Mascots can serve as the signposts that draw attention to their hidden value and invite people to care about the ecosystems behind them.
Perhaps the most famously successful deployment of the flagship species concept is China’s network of ‘Panda Parks,’ which more than tripled nature reserve areas across two decades. This of course benefited panda populations. It also provided numerous conservation benefits to less well-known taxa that depend on habitats that happen to also support Pandas. Although there are many examples of flagship species motivating landscape conservation, this connection has rarely been applied explicitly to peatland landscapes.
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Part of a research project at the University of California, Santa Cruz.