Brian Kipruto

Peatlands are wetlands with a layer of carbon-rich organic material below the surface known as peat, with varied water saturation levels determining the level of decomposition. In a healthy condition, peatlands play a crucial role in climate regulation by sequestering and storing one-third of the world’s soil carbon, despite covering only approximately 3% of Earth’s land area. However, peatlands face extreme pressure from anthropogenic uses. In Rwanda, population growth has led to agricultural expansion into peatlands, with drainage-based production resulting in more than 50% of Rwandan peatlands being degraded, compared to 8% at the continental level. This study uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the ecological condition of Rwandan peatlands, their role in food provisioning, and how peatland’s role and conditions might change in the future due to climate and population shifts. Remote sensing approaches will be used to create a land use classification for Rwanda’s peatlands, focused on farmed and protected peatlands and assess peatland land cover changes over a 205- year period. Surveys and interviews with individuals farming on peatlands will explore contemporary land-use and food-production patterns and amounts, and the governance structures that inform peatland agriculture. These findings will feed into the development of models that will explore future peatland outlooks based on climate change scenarios, their reported use, and population dynamics. Overall, this research advances knowledge of human-peatland interactions in Rwanda and provides placed-based data on the use and conditions of the country’s peatlands, vital for informing policies aimed at achieving net zero and a just transition or similar policies being pursued by Rwanda.

Tropical peatlands

Remote sensing

Community livelihoods

Ecosystem services