Members of the RESPECT team recently braved Storm Amy to travel to the 2025 IUCN UK Peatland Programme Conference in Derry/Londonderry. This year’s conference, which took place at the Ebrington Hotel from 30 September to 2 October, was delivered as part of Northern Ireland Environment Week. In this article, four members of the project team reflect on the event, Northern Ireland’s new peatland strategy, and why peatlands remain a contested space.

Miranda Geelhoed: “I have never seen so much excitement for a digger”

On 17 September, Northern Ireland published its first peatland strategy. The strategy aims to deliver conservation, restoration and management of intact peatland, degraded peatland and peatland soils to support greater carbon storage and nature recovery. It includes actions around policy alignment, capacity building and research, knowledge sharing, communication and access, and governance and funding.

As a policy and legal researcher, the launch of the strategy provided the perfect backdrop for my first IUCN UK Peatland Programme Conference. The conference included an interesting mix of talks by scientists, practitioners and policy representatives. I also had the pleasure of visiting a privately-owned farm in the Antrim hills, where peatland restoration is undertaken in collaboration with the RSPB.

I have never seen so much excitement for a digger, as our group watched the operator skilfully move the peat to block ditches. As we traversed the bog, I was able to talk to other farmers about how they saw opportunities for peatland restoration within the wider context of an evolving agricultural sector, which faces uncertainty due to changing agricultural payments. A big question on their mind was to what extent continued agricultural use, even in a different form, was compatible with rewetting activities.

I was most inspired by workshops that centred around a just transition and community-led peatland management. The Tóchar (meaning path through the bog) project seeks to implement high-level EU just transition objectives in the Irish Midlands. It offers a combination of public and private governance structures, processes for community engagement, a funding scheme for landowners and farmers, and community storytelling. While Scotland is currently working towards putting its just transition principles into action, the Tóchar project offers valuable opportunities for learning.

Alex Currie: “The sheer range and abundance of opinions aired illustrated to me how peatlands are and remain a contested space”.

IUCN peatland conferences always bring with them a flurry of faces new and old, a rich and endless repository of ecologists, environmental scientists, contractors, researchers and data scientists converging to discuss a common passion: peatlands.

The 2025 theme of “Water Connections: from Source to Sea” delved into a range of subjects such as the hydrology of peatland ecosystems, their microbial composition, their place and role in wider landscapes, their resilience and vulnerabilities to land use and climate change, and the manner in which they shape land use, land management and communities from source to sea.

While dedicated to the place and role of peatlands within hydrological catchments, this year’s conference was regularly grounded in broader themes of the place of people within peatlands and the place of peatlands within society. These simmering discussions that emerged in every event of the three-day conference blossomed into a full-blown conference-wide discussion on the political ecology of peatlands.

This in turn led to a series of intriguing and often eyebrow-raising reflections from individuals representing some of the largest organisations leading peatland restoration discourses across the nations of the UK and Ireland. From reflections that restoration should be completely opened up and led by the free market, to considerations that the price of peatland restoration should be offloaded in part onto those visiting and accessing them, to deliberations on the detrimental impact of farming and seemingly haphazard draining, elements of the panel illustrated how conservation is itself a mirror of the political economy it is situated within.

Unsurprisingly, these reflections augured a plethora of contrasting opinions by many of those in the audience. This included reflections on peatlands and nature as public goods, calls for the meaningful integration and representation of agriculture in peatland restoration discourses, and calls for top industrial emitters to foot the bill for peatland restoration.

The sheer range and abundance of opinions aired illustrated to me how peatlands are and remain a contested space. They are a reflection of the complex world that they are in, a litmus of different and often contrasting socio-cultural, economic and political understandings of what peatlands are and what they ought to be.

Wenguang Tang: “These three days significantly deepened my understanding of peatland restoration”

Attending conferences is always important for scientists, as they provide valuable opportunities to share and learn the latest findings, exchange ideas, explore collaborations and build networks with researchers from other institutions and organisations.

From the presentations, I learned that rewetting is the most commonly used method for peatland restoration globally. However, I also discovered that long-term monitoring – especially of carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions – is still lacking in many restoration projects.

Through poster sessions, I learned about key environmental and management factors that influence restoration outcomes, such as forest clear-cutting, temperature, rainfall and nitrogen deposition.

One of the highlights was visiting the CAFRE Hill Farm Centre, where I saw a very successful farmer-engaged peatland restoration project. These peatlands were restored from former forest and agricultural land. I also learned that intact peatlands continue to act as carbon sinks, reinforcing the importance of their protection.

During a field course, I gained new insights into the ecological role of mosses in ecosystems – an aspect I had previously overlooked in my own research. Additionally, I was able to establish new academic connections with researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, University of East London, University of Manchester and others.

Attending this conference was a milestone in my postdoctoral research. These three days significantly deepened my understanding of peatland restoration and provided valuable inspiration and direction for the next steps in my work.

Adeline Shaw: “Be with the bog, talk about the bog, and only later – write about the bog”

As PhD students tend to do, I have found myself thinking a lot recently. With an active mind, questions circle back and forth: what exactly am I trying to do in this PhD? How am I going to do this? Who do I want to become through this process?

My PhD, which is supposed to be about human-peatland relationships on a variety of scales (looking specifically at both social/cultural and legal relationships to peatlands), can feel elusive, and I have been grappling recently about the best way forward, especially as I submit an ethics application form for upcoming empirical research. The big question remains: what comes next?

With all these thoughts at my mind’s forefront, I found myself signing up for the creative methods workshops at the IUCN UK Peatland Programme Conference, excited by the possibility of working out some of these questions. On the first day of outings at Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s homeplace, we are dropped off at a bog by which Heaney used to walk every day on his way to school.

In a quiet moment, the group is encouraged to use all our senses – all five – to take in the bog; we will need it for our creative writing exercise later. I grab a blackberry off the bush next to me and watch as juice the colour of blood runs down my fingertips. The next day, in another creative writing exercise, we are taken around a mossy wood. Not a bog, but the same principles apply: pay attention now, write later. I grab a magnifying glass to look at the tiny leaves on a piece of bright green moss.

On the last afternoon of the conference, the group I am in is given creative writing exercises and asked to base our writings on all that we’d observed. All week, all I’d been asked to do: talk about the bog, observe the bog, write. Later still, in bed, I think: that’s it. That’s the formula for the answers to these questions: be with the bog, talk about the bog, and only later – write about the bog.

Back home now, there are still many unanswered questions. But whenever in doubt, I come back to the IUCN UK Peatland Programme Conference: be with the bog, talk about the bog, and then... write about the bog!

More about the RESPECT project

Rapid Engagement with Stressed Peatland Environments and Communities in Transformation (RESPECT) is one of five separate transdisciplinary research projects funded alongside the LUNZ Hub. RESPECT is carrying out cutting-edge research on peatland restoration in the UK and will develop tools to help farmers, crofters and land managers make effective peatland restoration decisions, while also suggesting a suite of practical policy changes to better support sustainable land management. You can learn more about the project by following us on LinkedIn or subscribing to our project newsletter.

 

First published: 26 November 2025

<< RESPECT outputs and events