Although sustainability and climate change mitigation are global issues, they require a mix of government-level and local solutions to address the challenges most pressing to people around the world. This is especially true of the world’s most valuable remaining ‘intact’ ecosystems, such as the peatlands of Peru – which store vast amounts of carbon and form the backbone of social, cultural, and economic life for local communities.
Dr Euridice Honorio Coronado is a NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellow in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development. Her work on supporting both governance and communities in Peru’s peatland ecosystems has resulted in significant positive policy and community changes to wetland management and could extend to peatlands around the world.
What are peatlands, and why are they important?
Peatlands are wetland ecosystems whose soils are comprised of peat: a material formed by accumulations of partially decayed vegetation due to slow decomposition in anoxic (without oxygen), waterlogged conditions. Keeping the carbon stored in ‘intact’ peatlands by avoiding vegetation loss and drainage has become the subject of increased focus in climate conversations. They are the world’s largest terrestrial source of carbon storage, storing over double the amount of carbon in all of the world’s forests.
However, these critical ecosystems require protection, especially in the context of global warming and climate change. For many years, peatlands have been drained to extract peat for fuel and its vegetation cleared to expand commercial agriculture and forestry plantations – transforming these ecosystems from a vast sink for carbon storage to a major source of carbon emissions. According to the UN Environment Program, carbon emissions from drained and burned peatlands equate to 10% of all annual fossil fuel emissions. As such, protecting, managing and restoring peatlands have been a major focus of conservation and climate change mitigation efforts in recent years.
Peru’s peatlands have gathered significant research interest due to the large amount of carbon they store, and have informed new scientific explorations across the globe (e.g. the Congo basin) to better understand the distribution and occurrence of peatlands in the tropics. Since 2008, Euridice has been researching the wetlands of northern Peru, where extensive peatlands have been reported. These peatland ecosystems in northern Peru have been significant for conservation. Her research focuses on understanding the floristic composition and ecosystem functioning of wetlands and peatlands – as well as how communities living near them rely on these ecosystems for economic, social, and cultural life (e.g. hunting, fishing, and gathering fruits and textile fibers for subsistence and income). Most recently, this research background has led Euridice to strengthen her work with the Peruvian government to ensure that protection for these ecosystems was enshrined in policy.
Translating science into policy
In 2010, while working at the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute (IIAP), Euridice collaborated with Katy Roucoux and Ian Lawson of the School of Geography and Sustainable Development on a project to understand the long-term vegetation history of peatlands in Amazonian Peru using paleoecology. Since they have worked together on several research projects which have also included institutions from the Tropical Wetlands Consortium, and the participation of PhD students and postgraduate research fellows. This collaboration placed significance on building trust and connections between institutions, which remains a major focus of Euridice’s work.
Research from this collaboration eventually informed Euridice’s first project of translating science into policy: ensuring that scientific knowledge was included, used well, and prioritised by Peruvian government offices. As part of this process, she sat on an advisory committee led by the Peruvian Ministry of Environment, which sought and reviewed actions and policies to protect peatlands through (1) defining criteria for wetland prioritization, (2) developing guidelines for peatland identification, and (3) defining actions to reduce carbon emissions as part of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement. As well as advising on wetland management to the Protected Areas National Service in Peru (SERNANP), Euridice used her expertise to propose a monitoring system for peatland’s resource management. Euridice’s team, including researchers from IIAP and the Universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh and Leeds, put forward a peatland map produced by combining field research and remote sensing. After many rounds of evidence-based debate, her team’s methodology was selected for use by the Ministry of Environment in the NDC.
After collaborating with external organisations including IIAP, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and UN Environmental Programme as part of the advisory committee to develop the NDC for peatlands, Euridice is currently looking toward its implementation. Subsequent phases will include following up with stakeholders and researchers, which is an ongoing process of communication and collaboration between the University of St Andrews and Peruvian institutions.
Community research in palm swamps
Euridice’s work also includes a grassroots-focused project about community-based management of peatland resources by local people who live in a protected area in northern Peru. The project focuses on the communities of Parinari and Veinte de Enero where people harvest the fruits of Mauritia flexuosa, a dominant peatland palm in Amazonia, for income.
The fruits of M. flexuosa, locally known as aguaje, were traditionally harvested by cutting down the palms: a relatively harmless practice, as the community of harvesters was small and felled only a few palms per year. However, as aguaje harvesting expanded as a business in the 1990s, the number of felled palms increased significantly, reducing resource availability and leading to calls for interventions to protect the forest as well as local livelihoods. Eventually, the community of Parinari came to the solution of climbing rather than felling palms for fruit harvesting, and climbing has been in place ever since.
However, there has been a lack of research about the ecological and socio- economic effects of adopting climbing on the recovery of the population of aguaje, and whether this recovery has benefitted these communities. Euridice took on the task of filling this research gap, working with IIAP, SERNANP and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
The project aimed to collect ecological data to form indicators about the intervention’s effects on the environment, and interview people about their understandings of how their ecosystem and livelihoods had changed. This included training local forest rangers – who regularly visited different aguaje harvesting communities in the region to promote climbing – in the intermediary work of using the researchers’ data in local management plans. As such, new insight from the communities themselves will inform how these ecosystems can be sustained into the future.
Euridice has been able to apply her global and local research to other critical peatlands: for instance, those of the Congo Basin where national and international organisations are also working to develop policies to protect these vulnerable ecosystems. Her role as a ‘boundary spanner,’ exchanging knowledge across institutions and people, has allowed Euridice to generate significant impact in the governments and communities she has worked with. Although she anticipates both challenges and opportunities in her policy implementation and future community research, she stays motivated by her belief in the future of ecosystems, with respect and consideration for the people that inhabit them.
