Beyond Carbon Sequestration: The Critical Oversight of Emission Avoidance in Restoration of Wetland Ecosystems Commentary

A recent study by Tölgyesi et al. 1 assessed the global potential of ecosystem restoration to mitigate climate change, concluding that restored ecosystems have very limited carbon sequestration potential (here referring to the net long-term uptake and storage of atmospheric CO2 in biomass and soils), compared to historical human carbon emissions. While this key message of their work may be valid, we need to highlight several important limitations in commonly used assumptions when such modeling approaches are applied to anthropogenically converted wetlands and peatlands. The conclusion risks misleading policymakers because it only accounts for carbon drawn down from the atmosphere. The equally critical climate benefit of restoration—preventing ongoing greenhouse gas emissions from degraded ecosystems (i.e., the reduction of ongoing greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise occur under continued land degradation) 2—is overlooked. By ignoring this avoidance potential, the work offers a partial and potentially misleading picture of restoration’s role in climate mitigation. This oversight may lead to incomplete assessments of restoration’s climate role at a time when effective land-based strategies are urgently needed to support global net-zero targets by 2050, and the existence of climate change, as well as the need to restore ecosystems for human well-being, are increasingly challenged by parts of society 3. We emphasize that our comment is intended to complement, rather than invalidate, global restoration assessments by highlighting an additional dimension—avoided emissions—that is particularly relevant for emission-dominated wetland systems and near-term climate policy.