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Fifteen years ago, when Chilean biologist Carolina León began studying peatlands, a type of wetland that covers approximately 2.86 million hectares in southern Chile, these ecosystems were still a mystery to many. “They were considered swampy areas with no ecological value,” says León from Santiago, where she leads the Center for Research in Natural Resources and Sustainability at the Bernardo O’Higgins University. In a laboratory dominated by shelves with jars of soil and vegetation samples, a white board with temperature records and microscopes, scales and stoves, León explores how to preserve them, with funds from the National Research and Development Agency. Today the panorama of her in her country is different. Chile has just passed a law to protect them, recognizing their value for mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
Peatlands are humid ecosystems where large amounts of decomposing organic matter accumulate. They form under conditions of constant water saturation, which limits the complete decomposition of vegetation. This condition gives rise to the formation of peat, a layer of organic soil, and above it, a plant cover of moss. sphagnum magellanicum locally known as pompón, from its name in Mapudungún, the Mapuche language, which is PON Pon, and it means sponge. The pompom can absorb up to twenty times its weight in water.
If forests capture carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and store it in the biomass of trees and plants, peatlands have the capacity to retain it under the pom pom. In fact, despite only covering 3% of the Earth’s surface, they store approximately 30% of the world’s soil carbon, more than all the planet’s forests combined.
In May 2023, the scientific journal Austral Ecology published a study led by Jorge Pérez, professor at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of the University of Chile, which revealed that peatlands are one of the most efficient ecosystems in carbon retention, with a storage capacity that can reach up to 1,700 tons per hectare. According to Pérez, this indicates that the forests and peatlands of Chilean Patagonia contain almost twice as much carbon per hectare as the forests of the Amazon.
However, poor practices in the extraction of pompom, marketed as a substrate for plants, became the main threat to these ecosystems. “Peatlands are essential in the fight against climate change,” explains León. “If we destroy them, we release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
To study the peatlands, León moved to the Los Lagos region, almost a thousand kilometers south of Santiago, because pompom harvesting began there twenty years ago and it is the main point where it is extracted, according to the Agricultural and Livestock Service of Chile (SAG). On the ground he saw the deterioration. He met extractors who drained these ecosystems and removed the pompom with chainsaws, using tractors, backhoes and oxen to move it. But he also discovered cases like that of Tomás Ovando, a 68-year-old extractor, who exchanged information with scientists about his harvesting technique. Instead of preying, according to León, he “understood that there were conditions in the ecosystem that facilitated growth.”
In 2018, discussion began on the bill to protect peatlands – known as the Pompón Law – which initially sought to prohibit their extraction. This proposal generated a confrontation between environmentalists, who defended a total ban, and extractors, who feared losing their jobs.
After five years of modifications to the law in the Chilean parliament, in 2023, the intervention of the Minister of the Environment, Maisa Rojas, marked a turning point by proposing the creation of a scientific committee to advise the discussion. This unprecedented group, made up of León, Pérez and three other scientists, in addition to the lawyer Verónica Delgado, concluded that the sustainable extraction of the pompom was possible under specific conditions, seeking to make the protection of peatlands and economic activities compatible. This diagnosis unlocked the discussion and allowed consensus for the law to be approved.
Today the norm establishes that the pompom harvest plan that was previously required now be replaced by a sustainable management plan that encompasses the ecosystem. In the words of Pérez, “you not only have to specify how much moss you are going to extract, but also how you will do it, follow certain instructions according to the environment and monitor the state of that peat bog to ensure that it regenerates.” Delgado explains that today there is little oversight, and when illegal extraction is discovered, the pompom is confiscated, but those who commit the crime are not punished. “When the law is implemented, these behaviors will be sanctioned,” says the lawyer.
Training peat bog guardians
In southern Chile, despite the approval of the law, conflicts between environmentalists and extractors have not ceased. The drafting of the regulations to implement the standard depends on the Ministry of the Environment and could take two years. Environmentalists insist on the urgency of prohibiting extraction. Geographer Álvaro Montaña, a member of Defendamos Chiloé, the most active environmental group on this island in the Los Lagos region, says that a management plan is not enough “because the monitoring capabilities are not there and because the social, economic and cultural values of all the resources that have been managed or attempted to be managed end up falling into exploitation. If we are not able to stop the exploitation of the native forest, the less we will be able to manage a resource that grows millimeters per year,” he adds.
On the other hand, extractors argue that a ban would endanger their livelihood. “Without this job, we are going to have to migrate and leave our children in the care of a relative,” says Natalie Uribe, president of the Association of Moss Pruners of the Province of Llanquihue. “There is a chain that provides a lot of work to the region,” she says.
In her visits to the field, Minister Maisa Rojas has met extractors who “have developed collective learning regarding the growth and management of this moss, which will allow this knowledge to be generated and institutionalized in the regulations and technical guides,” she says. These good practices, adds Rojas, will be recognized with certificates that will be required by the entire production and eventual export chain, “ensuring that the Chilean moss purchased abroad meets good management standards.”
While waiting for the implementation of the law, scientist Pérez leads a ten-year monitoring of the carbon and water cycle of a peat bog and also that of a forest at the Senda Darwin Biological Station in Chiloé. There, in “a place open to receive people,” he has concluded that any management of these ecosystems “must be sustainable and follow the appropriate recommendations to ensure their recovery.”
This look is also León’s
Days ago, in the municipal quincho of Quemchi, in Chiloé, León launched a sustainable extraction manual in addition to video capsules on critical matters in the regulation such as water levels and monitoring moss growth. One of them highlighted the work of Ovando, whom the scientist considers “a reference.” At the event, he presented certificates to participants of his moss regeneration training program that began in February 2022. And he also called on extractors to share his experiences.
These tools, explains León, are intended to prepare extractors for the future regulations. After its launch, León invited to see an experiment that began 22 months ago on a peat bog degraded by bad practices. There, on a property between Patagonian grasslands, he developed a regenerative management model for the recovery of the vegetation cover where moss grew. With this he showed the community that regeneration is possible and effective, in specific contexts.
León and his team believe that on-the-ground education is key. For her, it would be ideal for extraction to be done in recovered peatlands, while those that are not damaged are left alone. But for that she must first train the extractors in its management. “We want to empower them to become guardians of the peatlands,” she says.
