2026-06-05 · gigatonnes carbon in peatlands
Peat holds more carbon than all forests
Waterlogged peat soils store dead plant carbon for millennia. Draining them turns sinks into sources.
Draining a peatland doesn't just dry the ground — it opens a carbon vault that water sealed for millennia. The world's peat holds roughly 600 gigatonnes of carbon: more than all forests, and — in this grid's illustrative split — slightly more than all other soils combined (52% vs 48%). Keep it wet, or the sink becomes a source.
1 cell = 0.6 gigatonnes carbon in peatlands (0.1% of global peatland carbon stock) · 1,000 cells
Context
Waterlogged, oxygen-poor peat slows decomposition to a near standstill, so dead plants pile up faster than they rot and carbon accumulates for millennia. Drainage reverses that balance: exposed to air, peat decomposes and releases its carbon, turning a long-term sink into an ongoing source.
The ~600 gigatonne estimate for the global peatland carbon stock comes from IPCC and Nature figures cited for this 2026 edition. The 52/48 split against other soil carbon is illustrative — a way to show peat's outsized share, not a precise budget.
For scale: agriculture is the dominant land use on Earth, covering about half of the world's habitable land — 4.8 billion of the planet's 13 billion hectares by FAO definitions, per Our World in Data. How that land is managed, including whether wet soils stay wet, helps decide whether carbon like peat's stays buried.
IPCC / Nature: peatlands ~600 Gt C — large share of soil carbon, illustrative split vs other soils.
Share and export
Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-06-05-peatland-carbon