Paludiculture on rewetted peatlands

What is paludiculture?

In the previous lessons, we saw that conventional agriculture on peat soils generally requires drainage. Lowering the water table makes the land easier to use, but it also exposes peat to oxygen, resulting in peat decomposition, greenhouse gas emissions and land subsidence.

We have learned that the central intervention to stop peatland degradation is rewetting the agricultural peat soil. But if we need to keep peat soils wet, can we still use the land productively?

One possible answer is paludiculture: productive land use on wet or rewetted peatlands. Rather than draining the peatland to make it suitable for conventional agriculture, paludiculture uses crops and management practices adapted to wet conditions.

We start this lesson with a ‘graphical abstract’ (a visualized summary of a scientific publication) about productive use of wet and rewetted peatlands and its potential environmental benefits and trade-offs.

• Open the graphical abstract of a scientific article authored by Temmink et al. in 2026 which reviews the sustainability potential of paludiculture.
• Start by looking only at the left side of the graphical abstract: Which consequences of drainage do you recognise from the previous two lessons?