This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The birds are up with the sunrise—warblers, flycatchers, sparrows and towhees calling across the treetops. Deer browse on tender buds emerging from dense shrubs.
Black bears scrounge for roots, insects and other edibles. It's an idyllic setting in North Carolina's Inner Banks, where fields of cotton, soybeans and corn stretch for miles, country roads wend through stands of pines and thousands of bird watchers converge to witness the spring migration. But it's what's underground that has drawn scientists and investors to this 23-square-mile (60-square-kilometer) tract: spongy, dense peat up to 15 feet (5 meters) deep.
Fifty miles (80 kilometers) of ditches dug decades ago for an abandoned farming venture drained much of the water from thousands of years of accumulated peat, leaving the site vulnerable to drought and wildfires, altering its native habitats—and allowing it to emit 130,000 tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide a year. "Our goal is for perpetuity to conserve these lands so they can't become oil and gas fields, so they're not mined for phosphorus or turned into parking lots and shopping centers," said Tripp Wall, CEO of Colorado-based company Pantheon Regeneration. "They're just these incredible systems that I feel are underappreciated here in the U.S. (that) for 10,000 to 15,000 years have been climatologically resilient until we screwed them up." Peatlands are a climate paradox.
Though they account for just 3% of global land surface, they store one-third of the Earth's carbon dioxide, more than all forests combined. But when degraded—primarily when farmers lower the water table to grow crops—destroyed or burned, they become part of the problem, releasing huge volumes of greenhouse gases, now about 6% of the annual global total from all sources. And the type of peatlands found in North Carolina, and for hundreds of miles along the Eastern Seaboard, are among the most threatened in the world.
Pantheon plans to reverse the damage by blocking off ditches to control the water table and significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Then it will cull invasive species and replant native grasses, flowers and other plants. The restoration is modeled after other projects by nonprofits and government agencies, including at the adjacent 175-square-mile (453-square-kilometer) Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge—one of the largest peatland restoration projects in the U.S.—which provides habitat for threatened and endangered species such as red wolves, yellow pitcher plants and Atlantic white cedar, and has become an important stopover for migrating birds such as Tundra swans.
But what sets apart Pantheon's project is a plan to sell carbon credits to tech companies and other corporations that want to compensate for their own greenhouse gas emissions, then use the money to restore and preserve a million acres (1,562 square miles, or 4,047 square kilometers) of peatland from Virginia to northern Florida over the next decade. Each property will be permanently conserved and rewilded—"big corridors, big birding habitats, big biodiversity hotspots that have an outsized impact on climate," said Wall. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
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