At the 2025 ETC Annual Event in Waterford, Dr. Doug McMillan of Green Restoration Ireland (GRI) took the stage to share how paludiculture and peatland restoration plays a vital role in Europe’s path toward sustainable agriculture and climate resilience. His presentation highlighted the Smart Carbon Farming (SCF) project as a model for how EU collaboration can drive measurable impact on the ground.
Speaking to a room of policymakers, researchers, and regional stakeholders, Dr. McMillan outlined how GRI’s work in Ireland and across North-West Europe is demonstrating the potential of carbon farming on peatlands with high water levels. Through projects that promote paludiculture (aka wetter farming) and peatland restoration, degraded peatlands are being transformed into living carbon sinks that both mitigate and adapt to climate change all while locking in their huge carbon stores and restoring biodiversity and water quality.
“The future of farming lies in working with nature - even more so where peatlands are concerned,” McMillan explained. “Developing new agricultural methods like paludiculture allows us to raise the water table of peatland habitats on farms making it a silver bullet that creates sustainable livelihoods for farmers. This arises from the new foods and raw materials that wetter agriculture can produce, and from payments for resolving all the environmental issues created by dry peat, restoring the ecosystem services and nature that healthy peatlands provide.”
GRI’s work within Smart Carbon Farming focuses on bridging science and practice, developing field-tested solutions for measuring, reporting, and verifying (MRV) carbon storage in paludiculture and peatland restoration projects. These methods are helping to shape policy discussions and inform the evolving EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF).
Supported by the Interreg North-West Europe programme, Smart Carbon Farming brings together partners from Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Germany to develop scalable and equitable approaches to soil and peatland carbon storage. GRI’s contribution ensures that the lessons learned from Ireland’s peatland landscapes help shape a more sustainable farming future for all of Europe.
The ETC Annual Event reinforced the importance of such cross-border collaboration, where innovation, local knowledge, and EU policy meet to accelerate the transition to climate-smart land use.
