Triggered by the growth of the Soviet environmental movement in the early 1960s in response to the annihilation of Lake Aral, conservation frameworks for peatlands started back in 1968 with the TELMA Project where the term wetland was introduced to Estonia (Kumari 1974). These frameworks gained momentum after 1991 when the country regained its independence. It was with the Ramsar Convention (1993) on internationally important wetlands (Ilomets 1994, 325) that peatlands came into scientific and practical use more widely as they are affiliated with the term ecosystem services.

The historical conditions that made possible a vision of the biosphere as a planetary service economy lay in the 1970s and coincide with the expansion of neoliberal economics (Nelson 2014, 461-480). The origins of the term imply a pedagogical concept designed to raise public interest for biodiversity conservation (Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010, 1209-1218). However, its mainstreaming was engendered by the promulgation of the US Clean Air Act in 1990. With its “cap-and-trade” scheme in sulfur dioxide, the act unleashed a new era of “market-based environmentalism”. Encouraged by the US experience, the EU’s Emission Trading System (ETS) constituted the first international scale market-based conservation for ecosystem services. Launched in 2005, the scheme established a trading mechanism for carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases in the hope of meeting Kyoto targets on global climate change. With the invention of an effective market, CO2 became the currency of ecosystem services for the EU’s member states.

The accession to the EU in 2004 brought new challenges for Estonia on the “wise use” of devastated peatlands. The 2010 EU Biodiversity Strategy called the Member States to map the state of ecosystems and their services. The inventory of habitats for Estonian peatlands were prepared the same year with an emphasis on the potential use of these ecosystems (Paal and Leibak 2011). Taxonomies were produced and in a 2010 paper, Salm et al. (2010, 375-395) illustrated the effects of Estonia’s drained peatlands as a driver of environmental damage by estimating the fluxes of greenhouse gases. While only making up 15 percent of the total land area, drained peatlands were found to account for 83 percent of Estonia’s total land-related emissions. 

The Paris Agreement scaled carbon markets up to encompass land use, land use change and forestry sector (LULUCF). Referred to as the greenhouse gas inventory sector by the United Nations, the sector was responsible for 24 percent of the global anthropogenic GHG emissions back in 2010 (Smith et al. 2014, 2285–2302). Reducing CO2 emissions from carbon-rich soils, such as peatlands, became crucial for achieving land use related mitigation targets. Therefore, peatland restoration has been embraced as the most cost-efficient land use based GHG abatement measure. Carbon is now tracked and traded like any other commodity within what is known as the ‘carbon market’ (Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010, 1209-1218). 

It was then against this background that recovering degraded peatlands proved valuable and cost-efficient. Born out of an ecological concern to then becoming dematerialized and converted into a CO2 equivalent, the transformation of peatlands from sites of impact to evolve into sites of “services” thus inaugurated.

Mitigating climate change and the costs of climate-neutrality

As the EU declared its decarbonization project, entitled European Green Deal (Harvey and Rankin 2020), of 1tn EUR to shift from coal to climate emergency in the hope of becoming all but free of fossil fuels by 2050, the tension between climate change and costs of climate-neutrality increases. Celebrated as Europe’s “man on the Moon” moment (Lory and McMahon 2019), the ambitious project of making Europe the first ‘climate-neutral’ continent will be costly for many lives; including the ones in northeastern Estonia. This has been epitomized when Estonia's state-owned energy company Eesti Energia had to suspend the uneconomic operation of their power plants in the summer of 2019 due to high CO2 prices in the electricity sector where some 800 employees lost their job (Cavegn 2019). 

Oil shale is Estonia’s prime mineral resource. Its production makes 70 percent of the world's oil shale production and two thirds of Estonia’s total mineral production. This allows Estonia to be less dependent on an external supply of energy resources. Yet in order to respond to global trends in climate policy, the country faces the dilemma of decreasing its energy self-sufficiency to meet new CO2 targets. The country is the second-biggest CO2 emitter per capita in the EU (Eurostat 2019) in which the oil shale economy has a substantial share. Reducing the ecological footprint, however, would cost up to a billion EUR per year and some 13.000 jobs in northeastern Estonia (Vahtla 2018). Pressured by a limited demand for labour and skill mismatches, these people have nowhere else to go. There is, however, a light scattering the clouds: restored peatlands.

The relationship between the oil shale industry and peatlands is historically problematic. While maintaining oil shale as the backbone of Estonia’s electricity production may have allowed the Baltic nation to escape from beneath the Soviet yoke and become energy self-sufficient,  it has come at a cost. “We have lost our wetlands, we have lost our streams,” says Professor Mait Sepp (in Hutt 2017), research fellow at the University of Tartu. Somewhat less pronounced than the damages caused by drainage, the oil shale industry has been as lethal for peatlands.