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Question: The intensive use of peatland.

Answer: Peat in Europe is used mainly as a fuel for domestic and commercial use, and as a constituent of growing media in amateur and professional horticulture. Some peatlands have been drained and used for forestry. ‘Turf’ has been cut for domestic fuel for many centuries. In Denmark and the United Kingdom, for example, there is archaeological evidence of peat cutting in the pre-Roman period and turves have been found that are more than 2 000 years old. In northern Europe, peatland drainage for agriculture was initiated by the Romans in the lands that they conquered. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder in his Natural History described the utilization of peat by German tribes along the Rivers Elbe and Ems in the 1st century AD.7 By medieval times, peat largely replaced wood for fuel as forest cover declined. Peat charcoal was used to heat pottery kilns and furnaces for smelting iron ore. The demand for peat continued to increase until the beginning of the 19th century when native woodlands were cleared to make charcoal for iron industries and extensive rail and road networks were established to transport coal.
Peatland converted to agriculture
Peat turves cutting in Ireland. Photo: Marcel Silvius
Although the Romans initiated peatland and other wetland drainage in some of the lands they ruled, these activities were relatively small-scale and the drained areas were mostly abandoned when the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century. Starting from the 8th century, the extensive peatlands of Holland were drained, colonised and used as meadow, pasture and arable land. As early as 1 100 techniques for peatland reclamation and colonisation had achieved such success that Dutch expertise was exported to Germany and later to England and Scotland. The church, eager to derive economic benefit from this agricultural development, was an important driving force for the reclamation of marshes and peatlands in various parts of Europe during the Middle Ages. Large-scale wetland drainage in England accelerated in the 17th Century and continued into the late 19th century, notably in the fenlands of eastern England where the drained areas were used as pasture for livestock. In the Netherlands, where many peatlands are at or below sea level, an extensive system of dykes (polders) was constructed within which water table levels were kept low. Initially, drainage was done by gravity using a network of drains and channels. As technology advanced, wind-powered and electrical pumps enabled much larger areas of peatland to be drained and kept free from flooding. In the former Soviet Union alone, 2.5 million hectares of peatland were drained, equal to almost 27 percent of the total global area of peatland drained for agriculture.
Drained fen peatlands have provided some of the most fertile soils for crops and support high levels of production. On the other hand, drained bogs have problems of high acidity and waterlogging. Only marginally fertile, these produce low yields of grasses and crops. Agriculture on drained peatlands has always depended on local socio-economic conditions, and the agricultural use of peatlands has changed over time with many areas having been abandoned.
6 Intensive peatlands utilization includes all types of usage which requires drainage.
7 Similar stories on peat use can be also found in the peri-Himalayan areas of Pakistan, China and India.
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Peatland drainage and conversion to agriculture have virtually ceased in boreal and temperate zone countries. However, the drainage of peatlands is increasing in the tropics, especially in Southeast Asia where it was originally promoted by the Indonesian and Malaysian governments to boost rice cultivation. In Indonesia, peatland drainage was also part of the government’s transmigration programme for relocating poor, landless people from Bali, Java and Madura to less populated provinces in Kalimantan, West Papua and Sumatra. Currently, the palm oil and paper industries are fuelling rapid agricultural development in both countries. Between 1990 and 2010, more than 5.1 million hectares of peat swamp forest in peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo were lost. At the same time, the area used for industrial plantations of oil palm and paper pulp trees increased by 3.1 million hectares and covered 20 percent of the region’s peatland (Miettinen et al., 2012). It is predicted that, unless there are changes in land use policies or the markets for palm oil and pulp, by 2020 the area under industrial plantations will increase to between 6 and 9 million hectares.
Peatland forestry
Some peatlands support a natural
tree cover; others do not. In
their natural condition, forested
mires provide timber and other
non-timber forest products to
local communities, particularly in
tropical areas. Draining peatlands
allows wood production to be
carried out more intensively and
at less cost. Globally, around 12
million hectares of peatland, mostly
in northern boreal and temperate
zones, has been drained for forestry.
The principle countries that have
drained peatlands for forestry are
Finland and the countries of the
former Soviet Union, but it has
also been done in Norway, Sweden,
United Kingdom and the United
States. Finland, Sweden and the countries of the former Soviet Union together account for 80 percent of the area of peatland drained for forestry.
In the tropics, there is no long-term plantation forestry on peatland similar to that in the northern hemisphere. Instead, the focus is on selective logging or clear-cutting of natural forests. These natural forests are mostly replaced with plantations of oil palms or planted with rapid growing trees, such as Acacia spp. that are managed in short production cycle (6–10 years) for the paper industry.
Peat extraction for fuel and horticulture
By the end of the 19th century, coal largely replaced peat as domestic fuel in all but the remotest areas and most impoverished communities. In the first half of the 20th Century, the use of peat as a fuel in factories, heating plants and electricity generating stations increased. Initially, peat extraction was carried out by hand cutting sods or using small excavators, a process that left behind deep, irregularly shaped trenches in the surface of the peatland. The hand-cut sods were dried on site before being transported to homesteads or factories. Peat is now mostly extracted by large machines that remove a few centimetres of peat from a large area of bog by grinding (milling) the bare peat surface. The milled peat is left to dry for a few days until the water content falls to around 50 percent, and is then collected and transported to power stations or processing plants. Some milled peat is compressed into briquettes for domestic use or pellets for power stations.
The use of peat for generating electricity depends on national and local economic conditions and on the availability of other fuels. Peat is used for energy mostly in Europe, which accounts for, over 95 percent of peat extraction and consumption globally. Belarus, Finland, Ireland, the Russian Federation
Conversion of peatland for oil palm plantation, Indonesia. Photo: Susan Page

and Sweden account for 90 percent of the peat extracted for energy. In 1918, construction began on the first (and largest) Russian peat-fuelled Shatura Power Station near Moscow. The first peat-fired power station in Ireland was built in 1924 to provide electricity for a peat excavator on the Turraun peatland in the Irish Midlands from which peat was transported along the Grand Central canal to Dublin. During World War Two, because Ireland did not have an adequate supply of local coal, the country turned its attention to peat as the principal fuel for domestic heating and industrial power. At the same time, political decisions were taken by the Irish Government to develop peat-fuelled power stations next to major peat bogs so the country could become less dependent on imported coal and oil. All of the original milled peat stations have been closed due to the declining availability of peat. They have been replaced by three new, more efficient, power stations that will operate until 2025 to 2030 when peat use for electricity generation in Ireland will cease. At one time the former Soviet Union had more than 100 peat-fueled power stations. In Finland and Sweden, peat is used for fuel mostly for local district heating in winter or is co-fired with wood.
The modern horticultural industry originated as a response to changing socio-economic conditions after World War One, when an increasingly urbanised workforce required more food and began to cultivate vegetable gardens as well as ornamental plants. The first commercially available standardised growing media (the internationally recognised ‘John Innes’ mixes of loam, peat and sand) were developed in the 1930s in the United Kingdom. Peat replaced loam in the 1970s as good quality supplies of loam became difficult to obtain, and the growing medium was difficult to handle and expensive to transport. As people gained more leisure time and their demand for a regular supply of quality fruit, vegetables and ornamental plants increased, the horticulture industry boomed in developed countries. Peat is now used as the principal ingredient in most growing media mixes because of its consistency, reliability and low market price.
Transportation costs generally ensure that peat is used for energy mostly in areas where it is extracted. However, peat used for horticulture is traded internationally and may be transported over large distances. Countries with little or no peatlands import peat for use in the horticultural industry.
Peat extraction, especially in the European Union and North America is strictly controlled by local planning and mineral extraction conditions and codes of conduct implemented by private companies.

(Source: MITIGATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN AGRICULTURE SERIES 9 - Climate-responsible peatlands management (Food and Agriculture of United Nations), 01 Feb 2021)

Source Link: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4029e.pdf