Peatlands sequester carbon more efficiently than other ecosystems. In 2023, France devoted 3.8 billion euros to the protection of biodiversity and landscapes, of which 0.8 billion euros went to the rehabilitation of aquatic habitats. The IUCN identified measures producing co-benefits for carbon and biodiversity. Germany oriented a portion of its restoration strategy toward peatlands.
The Essentials
- France was preparing its national plan for ecosystem restoration. The preparation of the French plan provided for evaluating the climate potential of measures and supporting their prioritization.
- The IUCN assisted the French ministry in identifying measures with carbon and biodiversity co-benefits; this work fed into the preparation of the plan, and it is too early to conclude that there was no effect on the final plan.
- Peatlands present high carbon sequestration potential compared to other ecosystems; Germany directs a significant portion of its credits toward them.
- The allocation of credits responds to trade-offs between territorial political legitimacy and other feasibility criteria for the plan.
- Several member states are testing weighting mechanisms that maintain territorial coverage while redirecting a portion of credits toward ecosystems with high carbon sequestration potential.
1.5 Billion Euros and a Plan Without a Carbon Filter
This budgetary allocation reflects a tension between territorial political legitimacy and climate efficiency.
France presented its national restoration plan in 2026 as part of the European regulation on nature restoration. The IUCN provided technical support to the Ministry for Ecological Transition to identify measures capable of combining carbon return and biodiversity gains.
SDES accounts report 3.8 billion euros in biodiversity and landscape protection spending in 2023. They break this down by domains, notably 0.8 billion euros for the rehabilitation of aquatic habitats, but 0.9 billion euros in cross-cutting actions cannot be allocated between these categories and do not constitute targeted budget allocation.
The IUCN identifies in particular the scale of financing needs as an issue in restoration. The work of identifying co-benefits has been done. Habitats with strong carbon yield are known. But the project covers different ecosystems, and the actual targeting of credits cannot be established from the primary sources consulted. An environmental priority is formulated for ecosystems with high carbon storage potential, even if the actual distribution of French financing is not published.
Peatlands Change the Carbon Equation
The emission mechanism that follows drainage deserves clarification. When the water table drops, organic matter accumulated over millennia comes into contact with atmospheric oxygen and decomposes. This decomposition releases carbon at a rate that can exceed, on a heavily degraded peatland, the emissions of certain local industrial sectors. Simply maintaining a drained site in the state of an agricultural meadow therefore constitutes a continuous source of emissions, even in the absence of any intensive exploitation. Raising the water level interrupts this decomposition without necessarily eliminating it immediately, which means that the carbon benefit of restoration is deferred over time and depends on the speed of recolonization by sphagnum mosses.
Peatlands cover approximately 3 percent of the planet’s land surface. They store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined. In France, they are present in the Massif Central, the Vosges, inland Brittany, and several Alpine zones, but they were massively drained during the twentieth century for agriculture and peat extraction.
When a peatland is drained, it transforms from a carbon sink into a source. It emits mainly CO₂ and N₂O; CH₄ emissions depend on local conditions and are generally higher after rewetting. Rewetting and restoration of vegetation can ultimately restore the carbon sink function, without necessarily immediately reversing the emission mechanism. Scientific studies indicate that peatlands offer high carbon sequestration potential. Germany has directed a portion of its restoration credits toward degraded peatlands in its northern regions.
France has degraded peatlands in several regions. According to the French Biodiversity Agency (OFB), there is no precise national inventory making it possible to quantify the hectares of French degraded or semi-degraded peatlands. Their restoration reduces the emissions of remaining carbon and can progressively restore a carbon sink function. But this potential competes, in budget allocation, with other restoration projects: bocage hedgerows, river banks, calcareous grasslands, and coastal forests, all legitimate from a biodiversity standpoint.
The comparison with indigenous peoples of Oceania who protect blue carbon is instructive: there too, the ecosystems most dense in carbon, mangroves, seagrass beds, are the least politically visible and the most difficult to incorporate into financing mechanisms. Efficiency and political visibility do not naturally coincide.
The Territorial Logic That Resists Prioritization
This fragmentation of advocacy produces a structural consequence often underestimated: coordination costs increase as the number of covered habitats expands. A plan simultaneously targeting ecosystems with very different ecological logics, managing actors, and monitoring indicators requires proportionally greater administrative engineering capacities. This administrative dispersion absorbs a portion of available resources without contributing directly to sequestration, which mechanically amplifies the gap in carbon efficiency between a concentrated plan and a plan with broad coverage, beyond the mere effect of differentiated yields by ecosystem.
The construction of a national restoration plan involves several actors: the state, regions, water agencies, sectoral agencies, local authorities, and associations. Each territorial actor defends the habitats it knows, manages, and on which it has projects and financing already partially committed. A concentration of credits on peatlands could affect the distribution of resources among habitats and the balance of sectoral interests in negotiation.
Bocage regions defend hedgerows. Coastal Conservancies defend dunes and salt marshes. Water agencies defend riverbanks and riparian wetlands. Each of these pleas is founded on a real ecological reality. None is false.
But together, they produce a list that resembles less a strategy than a catalog.
This mechanism is not unique to France. Several member states have opted for plans with broad territorial coverage of different ecosystems. The reason is everywhere the same: a plan that local actors reject is not executable, even if it were optimal on paper.
The tension between measured efficiency and political feasibility deserves to be named. An allocation maintaining broad territorial presence while redirecting a substantial portion of credits toward habitats with high carbon return remains technically conceivable.
Experiences of Other Countries
Germany is not the only case available. Several member states of the European Union are testing weighting mechanisms that seek to reconcile territorial coverage and efficiency.
Member states are testing weighting mechanisms that account for carbon potential in the allocation of restoration credits. Some member states adjust their allocations by taking carbon sequestration potential into account. Territorial coverage remains broad, but the internal distribution of credits is weighted.
Scotland has established the Peatland ACTION financing program, administered notably by NatureScot, to restore peatlands, while other mechanisms finance the diversity of other habitats. The specialization of a fund on a specific ecosystem makes it possible to build technical expertise and reduce transaction costs.
These experiences are not directly transferable to France, whose diversity of natural habitats and institutional complexity are greater. But they show that there are intermediate instruments between pure optimization, concentrating everything on peatlands, and diffuse allocation without hierarchy.
The IUCN’s Work and Its Consequences
The IUCN’s technical work deserves close attention, because it says something about the distance between diagnosis and decision.
The IUCN assisted the French ministry in identifying, among the restoration measures under consideration, those presenting simultaneous co-benefits for climate and biodiversity. This identification work is documented and rigorous.
No conclusion on an allocation rule of a final plan can be drawn as long as the plan remains under development. The final plan targets all ecosystems, in accordance with the requirements of the European regulation, which imposes broad coverage by habitat type. The nature restoration regulation sets objectives for each major category of ecosystem and covers notably terrestrial, coastal and freshwater, marine, urban, agricultural, and forest ecosystems, as well as obligations relating to watercourses and pollinators. It prohibits neglecting the obligations applicable to other ecosystem categories.
France is subject to this framework and has prepared a draft plan; the Commission evaluates it within six months; France then finalizes its plan while duly taking the Commission’s observations into account. But within this framework, room for maneuver exists. The regulation sets floors, not ceilings for concentration. A state can decide to go beyond the minimum required on certain habitats while meeting minimum requirements on others.
The regulation frames sectoral objectives and leaves the choice of measures, without making it possible to establish a non-published French allocation of credits.
Next Milestones
The 2030 horizon set by the European regulation is approaching. In 2026-2027, submission, evaluation, and finalization of plans mainly take place; the first complete progress reports are scheduled for 2031. They will reveal two things: how many hectares have actually been restored by ecosystem type, and what volume of carbon has been sequestered or avoided.
It is at this point that the allocation question will take on a new political dimension. If broad-coverage plans produce satisfactory biodiversity results but disappointing carbon results, pressure to revise allocation criteria will intensify, especially as climate objectives for 2030 and 2035 will simultaneously be under evaluation.
The French Biodiversity Agency has begun documenting the first returns from the France Recovery Fund on wetland restoration. These data, still partial, will make it possible to fuel a debate that has so far been too abstract. The portion of the restoration budget guided by measured carbon efficiency must be distinguished from the portion responding to other criteria: local natural heritage, non-carbon ecosystem services, and social acceptability.
This question has no single answer. But it deserves to be posed with figures rather than principles. France has the scientific corpus to do so. It also has a network of actors, water agencies, regions, NGOs, capable of carrying out finer prioritization if it is co-constructed rather than imposed. The difficulty is real.
It is not insurmountable.
Sources
- IUCN France, IUCN Recommendations for National Restoration Planning: Insights from France (2026): https://iucn.org/story/202603/iucn-recommendations-national-restoration-planning-insights-france
- European Institute for Environmental Policy (IEEP), Analysis of Financing of the European Nature Restoration Regulation, 2023-2025 (no certified URL)
- French Biodiversity Agency (OFB), Results of the France Recovery Fund on Wetland Restoration (no certified URL)
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 of the European Parliament and of the Council on Nature Restoration, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32024R1991
