Reduce, remove, avoid? Making a market for peatland carbon credits in the UK

This article tracks ongoing attempts to ameliorate the position of peatland carbon credits within the categorical and calculative structures of emergent natural capital markets. The restoration of drained peatlands through soil rewetting is a key form of climate mitigation within UK efforts to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. As such, expert advisers and policymakers have called for an unprecedented scaling-up of peatland rewetting, even as landowners and conservation organisations are increasingly expected to fund restoration through private finance, particularly the sale of carbon credits. Peatlands, however, enter carbon markets already structured by crucial distinctions between credits which represent the active removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and those which reflect only the prevention of new or further emissions into the atmosphere. These distinctions constitute a categorical regime which valorises and disproportionately fuels demand for removal credits, thereby incentivising forms of environmental management which promise to deliver carbon dioxide removal. Under existing regulatory frameworks, however, peatland restoration is deemed to generate carbon credits linked only to the prevention of new or further emissions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, we show how protagonists in these debates argue that the prevailing carbon market categorical regime represents a major barrier to the national scale-up of peatland restoration, such that it counterproductively discourages external investment. Moreover, we show how protagonists have sought to improve the position of peatland carbon credits, either by redrawing the causal pathways through which responsibility for peatland emissions is assigned, or by reinterpreting the admissibility of specific fluxes of GHG within peatland carbon accounting itself. Unpacking these debates, the article exposes a pernicious and unintended consequence of market-driven environmental governance more broadly, wherein the social, cultural and ecological value of peatland landscapes is subordinated entirely to the rationale of market expansion, and attendant logics of offsetting.