The Project

Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), PeatSense investigates how global climate mitigation initiatives are transforming peatland landscapes across Latin America and Europe. Although peatlands store over a third of the world’s soil carbon, emerging carbon markets and monitoring technologies, such as drones and remote sensing, frequently frame these spaces as empty, sidelining Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. PeatSense critically examines how different forms of environmental expertise are codified, contested, and valued. By combining political ecology, science and technology studies (STS), and participatory methodologies across eight international case studies, the project works alongside local communities to foster just, inclusive, and ecologically grounded climate futures.

Crucially, PeatSense addresses a key tension in contemporary climate governance: while remote sensing and carbon accounting rapidly expand across Latin America and Europe, these environments have long been stewarded through diverse regional understandings. In Latin America, landscapes now categorised globally as ‘peatlands’ (turberas) have historically been lived in and governed as bofedales, páramos, aguajales, or pomponales. The project tests the hypothesis that valuing these diverse knowledges is essential not only for climate justice, but for sustaining peatland ecologies themselves. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, historical archives, and participatory platforms, PeatSense bridges scientific metrics with local sensing practices to co-produce inclusive pathways for future policymaking.

Work Packages

The PeatSense project is separated into five distinct strands of research, called ‘Work Packages’, with each Work Package engaging peatlands from a slightly different angle:

WP1 Diverse Peatland Knowledge Cultures

Diverse Peatland Knowledge Cultures examines how Indigenous and Local Environmental Knowledge (ILEK) is codified, negotiated, and valued alongside global climate interventions. Using ethnographic observation, qualitative interviews, and proxy ecological indicators—such as mosses, lichens, and case-specific species—this work package maps the power dynamics shaping peatland conservation. It culminates in the creation of a novel diagnostic tool, the Diverse Knowledge Device, designed to diagram gaps, overlaps, and disagreements between institutional expertise and community ways of knowing across priority sites.

WP2 Interpreting Peatland Pasts

WP2 investigates how shifting socio-political conditions, spatial developments, and environmental drivers have transformed peatland landscapes over time. Integrating historical ethnography with interdisciplinary data from paleoecology, ethnoecology, and environmental history, it draws on archival weather records, cartography, and oral histories to uncover critical tipping points toward degradation or restoration. These insights feed directly into The Peat Archives, an open-access repository featuring co-designed Interdisciplinary Timelines for each case study.

WP3 Geographies of Expertise in Climate Mitigation Futures

Applying a feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) framework, WP3 evaluates the financial logics, carbon accounting models, and technical infrastructures underpinning competing climate proposals in priority peatlands. Through policy analysis, infrastructure web mapping, and intergenerational exchanges involving youth across case regions, the package evaluates how expertise is institutionalised and who benefits from planned interventions. Findings will be synthesised into the landmark Inclusive Climates for Peatlands report and international conference.

WP4 Peatland Monitoring Technologies and Indigenous Cosmovisions

WP4 investigates how emerging digital monitoring tools—such as LiDAR, drones, and remote sensing—reconfigure human-landscape relationships and climate agendas. Through multi-scale interviews, field visits, and visual methodologies, it critically analyses the sociopolitical effects of these technologies—especially in post-conflict or sensitive landscapes—while bringing digital metrics into conversation with Indigenous and traditional ‘sensing practices’. This work package will produce an artist-collaboration film highlighting these technical tensions and alternative climate imaginations.

WPX Mobilities and Movements

WPX serves as the core participatory process running across the entire project timeline, establishing cross-regional dialogue between communities, researchers, and justice-oriented monitoring organisations. Utilising focus groups, inception workshops, and a multitemporal digital resource, this work package evaluates emerging project data alongside local stakeholders. Ultimately, it aims to co-author policy briefs and actionable governance points, redefining what substantive inclusion means for global peatland mitigation.

Case Studies

PeatSense investigates eight international case studies spanning Latin America and Europe. Rather than applying a rigid comparative lens, these sites offer diverse entry points into global peatland governance, connected by shared threads of deep-seated ecological stewardship, colonial histories, and the rapid arrival of carbon-focused climate interventions.

Each case study area has been selected according to four core criteria:

Designation as a ‘priority site’ for forthcoming global climate mitigation interventions
Continuous presence of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IP&LC) for at least 200 years
Rich existing body of interdisciplinary research (including paleoecology, ethnoecology, anthropology, and glaciology) published within the last decade
Safe, ethical access grounded in existing institutional and local community partnerships