A superpower that drained itself

We may as well own up to a certain bog-enthusiasm at the RELEX Foundation. Mires are beautiful, wild places, and in a country of intensive forestry they are often among the last where a human hand has not yet reached. But affection is not why we fund restoration of drained mires.

Peatlands and wetlands are among the most efficient carbon stores on the planet. They hold an exceptionally rich and threatened range of species found nowhere else. They also work as nature's own water treatment plants and sponges, filtering the nutrients that would otherwise load lakes and the Baltic Sea, and evening out both floods and droughts. Few habitats do so much at once, and few have been treated so carelessly.

A superpower that drained itself

Finland is a peatland superpower. Around 30 per cent of the EU's mires and peat soils are here, and they matter globally for biodiversity and climate alike. Large, intact boreal mire complexes, the great aapa mires of the north among them, survive in Europe mainly in Finland, Sweden and north-western Russia. Central and southern Europe drained theirs over the past centuries. That leaves Finland with an international responsibility few other countries carry.

It also leaves a substantial repair job. Finland once had 10.4 million hectares of mires. Today the total peatland area is 8.7 million, of which 4.7 million hectares have been ditched to boost timber production, with a small fraction used for peat extraction. On hundreds of thousands of those hectares the trees have grown poorly or not at all. That is peatland drained for little or no economic return in the end, which makes it an obvious place to look first. Whether it is also the best place to start is something researchers are still working out.

The gains arrive together

Peatland restoration is unusual in how many problems it addresses at the same time.

More than half of Finland's mire habitat types are threatened, and in southern Finland more than 80 per cent are assessed to be in decline. The main cause is decades of forestry ditching, which drained away the natural water balance of the mires. Restoration returns the conditions the species need to live.

The damage from old ditching does not fade with time. Research shows the load on waterways begins to multiply after a delay of twenty to thirty years. Drained mires wash out nutrients that eutrophy lakes and the Baltic Sea, and organic carbon that turns the water brown. That humus does not disappear, and instead it clouds waterways for decades. Blocking the ditches and guiding runoff back onto the mire cuts the cycle at its source.

Rewetting drained peat soil greatly slows the decomposition of the peat. On nutrient-rich, forestry-drained sites, net greenhouse gas emissions can fall by around 5 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per hectare per year, roughly half the annual carbon footprint of an average Finn, or the emissions from driving more than 30,000 kilometres in a petrol car. Finnish peat soils hold up to seven times as much carbon as all the trees in the country's forests combined. Restored mires also hold water when there is too much of it, which makes rivers less likely to flood.

The benefits do not stop at nature. Restoration is highly labour-intensive work, and Metsähallitus, the enterprise that manages Finland’s state-owned land and water, estimates that every million euros invested in nature management and restoration puts 24 people to work for a year. The money goes straight to local excavator contractors, forest workers and planners, which means it stays in the region rather than leaving it. Not every large investment Finland is currently courting works that way. Data centres, for example, employ relatively few people locally once built, and much of the labour that builds them comes from elsewhere. Landowners whose land is restored can find new sources of income, also through Finland's fast-developing nature value markets, which at best opens up livelihoods in places where the regional economy eagerly needs them.

Wet ground has also taken on a defence dimension since 2022. Finland's environment and defence ministries have studied the shared benefits of restoration and national defence along the eastern border, and similar thinking is under way across the EU's eastern flank.

The last of the benefits resists measurement altogether. Restoration gives people back a landscape worth spending time in, whether for walking, fishing, berry picking or hunting, all deeply part of Finnish culture.

From projects to catchments

To get the full value of any of this, the way the work is organised has to change.

Restoration currently happens in fragments, through individual projects, alongside the state's own work on land managed by Metsähallitus. That is inefficient, and a long way from what our nature requires and what Finland has committed to. The EU restoration regulation obliges the country to improve degraded habitats at scale, and the national restoration plan now being drawn up should set the pace. This asks for a move from tinkering to systematic work with targets attached.

Finland’s fragmented private land ownership slows restoration at scale down. On top of that, a landowner examining the state's financing instruments finds them complicated, bureaucratic and often unfair, and since the money on offer is thin, the paperwork seldom feels worth the trouble.

Finland already has skilled and committed people restoring mires, and every restored hectare counts. The opportunity is to connect this work into something larger. Joined up around a shared goal, separate projects gain synergies they cannot reach alone, and together they tell a story that is easier for funders, at home and abroad, to support.

A shared goal also gives each party a reason to take part. A municipality or city can link it to water quality and local livelihoods, a landowner can join an effort for the better of the home region, and a private financier finds something big enough to be worth financing. The national restoration plan and the regional biodiversity plans offer common tools.

Why we fund peatland restoration

Private money, ours included, gets called on now that public finances tighten. It cannot take over the state's responsibility, only add to it where the state reaches least, private land above all. Restoration targets are first and foremost the state's to carry, which requires restoring state land and building financing models private landowners find workable.

It also means stopping the damage. Continued ditching and peat extraction add to a restoration debt the economy pays later, and restoring a mire costs around ten times what draining it did. That calls for legislative change, the Water Act included, and for state-owned companies, Neova above all, to stop degrading mires further.

We fund the work that pushes the other way. Lumimuutos restores mires in North Karelia and Sápmi. LIFE Super EU is building the framework for expansion across Europe, combining public and private finance so the field can move beyond scattered experiments. The Landscape Finance Lab does the same around the globe.

Finland is a peatland superpower. It simply cannot afford to leave what its mires offer unused.