An emerging Republic of Ireland peatland standard aims to address biodiversity credits before the end of 2025, a sustainable finance non-profit has said.

The standard, with initial guidelines for generating carbon credits, should first launch by the end of 2024, with the following year the earliest possible date for biodiversity credits to emerge, though such units are not a guaranteed outcome, according to Paul Chatterton, lead of Landscape Finance Lab.

Peatland Finance Ireland was established in 2022 to support peatland restoration, bringing together government, the private sector, and local communities, in collaboration with Chatterton’s firm.

Alongside the peatland standard, Peatland Finance Ireland is working on creating a financial instrument for funnelling investment to landowners that could be a marketplace or a fund, he told Carbon Pulse.

The initiative is targeting over 3,000 landowners who collectively own 700,000 hectares of land with potential for peatland restoration, Chatterton said.

Most of this peatland is owned by smallholder dairy farmers, in addition to large areas held by an energy agency and a forestry agency.

“Hopefully there will be a nice, simple system that will say: ‘If you’re a landowner you can get a payment on carbon, nature, and water, and we’ll give you guidance about how [and] where to do the work so that it connects with your neighbours’,” Chatterton said.

The European Investment Bank has provided a technical assistance grant to Peatland Finance Ireland, while the government has been “very supportive”, and other investors are interested, he said.

BIODIVERSITY CREDITS

The scheme aims to generate payments for biodiversity credits that could be sold to local businesses to improve their nature credentials without offsetting harm elsewhere.

Appetite for buying biodiversity credits is “very clear” from speaking with around 250 larger companies in Ireland, he said.

The Irish peatland standard could build its biodiversity credit guidelines using the model created by Wild Atlantic Nature Life, which pays owners of 35 blanket bog sites in Ireland based on improvements to habitat quality.

“We haven’t looked at the nature metrics yet. The first task is to work with the guys who set up the UK Peatland Code and develop a peatlands standard for Ireland. The next stage will be biodiversity metrics,” he said.

“Quite a lot” of the 700,000 hectares of degraded peatland could generate biodiversity credits, he predicted, adding that restoring peatland has “enormous potential” for boosting biodiversity.

“I was talking to a banker who’s been supporting some similar investments in Finland, the restored boglands there went from about 10 species of birds to 200 in five years, because they created food for migratory birds,” Chatterton said.

In Australia, nature payments have added a “fair bit of cash” to farmers’ incomes, he pointed out.

CARBON STANDARD

The Irish peatland standard also aims to introduce a certification scheme for results-based payments for landowners for sequestering carbon.

Peatland Finance Ireland is working with landowners to try to enable peat restoration at scale, rather than with individual projects, as it is cheaper, according to Chatterton.

“We’ve got some test pilots already running with €3 million of investment,” he said.

“Our estimates are small-scale restoration costs about €100 a tonne. There’s a whole set of categories of restoration that are about €5 euro a tonne, when you get to scale.”

The Irish government is currently paying around €33 euro a tonne.

One challenge will be getting landowners to engage with a carbon standard.

“It’ll be tough because they’re conservative. The word ‘carbon’ will set off all sorts of alarm bells. But I think done the right way it should be it should be very attractive,” said Chatterton.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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