Towards a political ecology of “global peatlands”: entangled genealogies of resource, ecology, and carbon

Peatlands have risen on global climate agendas as strategic carbon stores, yet they are still often framed as a single, technical entity to be mapped, priced and fixed. This paper develops a political ecology of “global peatlands” that explores how they are rendered into a singular object of governance, while showing that this object is produced differently across space and time. Drawing on evidence from the Baltic region, Latin America, Ireland, and the UK, we trace three interlocking genealogies of this production: peatlands as resource stock, as ecological habitat, and as carbon store. We show how colonial and postcolonial projects of “improvement”, national energy and development schemes, and later biodiversity conservation and restoration have shaped this successive (re-)making of peatlands, establishing uneven legacies of cultural and physical dispossession, expertise, and infrastructure. Contemporary carbon accounting, finance, and digital monitoring rework these layered histories rather than replacing them, extending a “carbon gaze” that can simplify complex social and ecological relations and open new frontiers for financial accumulation. At the same time, we highlight frictions, contestations and alternative practices that complicate technocratic and market-led framings, including commons-based uses, Indigenous and local stewardship, and experiments with non-market forms of climate finance. This project to “unflatten” global peatlands by tracing its entangled genealogies chimes with wider political ecology and geographic concerns to denaturalise global natures as pre-given or as geographically consistent in their effects. As such, the paper contributes to wider debates in political ecology relating to questions of social and environmental justice in relation to the mitigation of the growing climate crisis. We argue that efforts to mobilise peatlands for climate mitigation must confront questions of knowledge, authority and ownership, and attend to situated histories, if they are to support just social and ecological transformations rather than reproducing older patterns of enclosure and unequal exchange.