In North Carolina, a race is on to restore critical peatland before it dries up or is destroyed

Neal Flanagan, right, a research scientist at Duke University, uses a tool to take a soil sample from a peatland as Curt Richardson, an ecology professor at Duke, observes Wednesday, May 6, 2026, in Belhaven, N.C. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel) 2026-09-09T13:02:44Z BELHAVEN, N.C. (AP) — The birds are up with the sunrise — warblers, flycatchers, sparrows and towhees calling across the treetops. Deer browse on tender buds emerging from dense shrubs. Black bears scrounge for roots, insects and other edibles. It’s an idyllic setting in North Carolina’s Inner Banks, where fields of cotton, soybeans and corn stretch for miles, country roads wend through stands of pines and thousands of bird watchers converge to witness the spring migration. But it’s what’s underground that has drawn scientists and investors to this 23-square-mile (60-square-kilometer) tract: spongy, dense peat up to 15 feet (5 meters) deep. They’re here to save it. A juvenile black bear walks through a clearing where peatlands are being restored Tuesday, May 5, 2026, in Belhaven, N.C. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel) License this photo A juvenile black bear walks through a clearing where peatlands are being restored Tuesday, May 5, 2026, in Belhaven, N.C. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel) --> Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. --> Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit A planter, right, works in a field adjacent to a peatland forest Tuesday, May 5, 2026, in Belhaven, N.C. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel) License this photo A planter, right, works in a field adjacent to a peatland forest Tuesday, May 5, 2026, in Belhaven, N.C. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel) --> Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. --> Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Fifty miles (80 kilometers) of ditches dug decades ago for an abandoned farming venture drained much of the water from thousands of years of accumulated peat, leaving the site vulnerable to drought and wildfires, altering its native habitats — and allowing it to emit 130,000 tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide a year. “Our goal is for perpetuity to conserve these lands so they can’t become oil and gas fields, so they’re not mined for phosphorus or turned into parking lots and shopping centers,” said Tripp Wall, CEO of Colorado-based company Pantheon Regeneration. “They’re just these incredible systems that I feel are underappreciated here in the U.S. (that) for 10,000 to 15,000 years have been climatologically resilient until we screwed them up.” Peatlands are a climate paradox. Though they account for just 3% of global land surface, they store one-third of the Earth’s carbon dioxide, more than all forests combined. But when degraded — primarily when farmers lower the water table to grow crops — destroyed or burned, they become part of the problem, releasing huge volumes of greenhouse gases, now about 6% of the annual global total from all sources. And the type of peatlands found in North Carolina, and for hundreds of miles along the Eastern Seaboard, are among the most threatened in the world. (