WP3: Peatland Triage Tool

WP3: Peatland Triage Tool

Objective: Create the cutting-edge Peatland Triage Tool (PTT) as decision-support for landholders seeking to undertake peatland restoration and reduce carbon emissions from land use.

Co-leads: Graham Ferrier and Jens-Arne Subke

Contributors: Adrian Bass, Deborah Dixon, Nick Hanley, Jill Robbie, Katherine Simpson, Nicki Whitehouse and Jiren Xu

Approach: The Peatland Triage Tool created in this work package will support landholders seeking to undertake peatland restoration. It will use the physical capacities and prioritisation of restoration areas (work package 1) and social capacities (work package 2) as baseline data for the two case study regions. These data will be combined with AI and machine learning to enable the impacts of land use, climate and sea-level change to be quantified at the landscape scale. Data on peatland restoration over the last twenty years from within and outside the case study regions will be used to assess peatland health and parameterise the Peatland Triage Tool.

Landholders’ motivations to engage in peatland restoration (work package 2) will be integrated into an agent-based ecological-economic model. This will simulate landholder decision-making at the farm scale to participate in restoration schemes. These designs will be mapped across the landscape scale, allowing comparison and contrast of ecological and economic outcomes under alternative incentives, including payments offered by carbon markets under the Peatland Code, and government-funded agri-environment payments.

The Peatland Triage Tool will be map-based, with a traffic light system to identify advantages and disadvantages of land use decisions, and the ability to obtain further detail on the trade-offs, consequences and opportunities. The ‘do nothing’ option will provide a risk register for the case study regions based on current land uses. Broader environmental co-benefits of peatland restoration (improvements in biodiversity, reduced flood risk and improved water quality) and expected/desired community benefits will also be fed into the tool.

The Peatland Triage Tool will be open-source, enabling access by relevant stakeholders and wider application. Early engagement with potential landholder users within the case study regions and policy stakeholders will inform its design. 

Key outputs for this work package will include:

• A risk-register for the two case study regions based on the current uses of the land.
• An ecological-economic model simulating landholder decision-making for peatland restoration.
• A Peatland Triage Tool (including smartphone app) as a decision-support tool for landholders in the case study regions.
• A methods template for replication of the Peatland Triage Tool in other regions.WP3: Peatland Triage Tool