When record-breaking wildfires in western Russia killed 65 people, injured 1,068, destroyed 3,500 homes and caused billions in damages in 2010, it was no longer business-as-usual in Russia’s response to the impacts of climate change.

Not only did the Russian government begin investing more in traditional fire suppression, fire science and prevention strategies, it also began, with financial help and expertise from Germany, to restore peatlands that had been badly degraded by agricultural developments and the mining of peat to produce energy for household use and power plants. A fifth of Russia is covered in peat, mostly the northeastern side of the country.

Peat is partially decomposed plant material that builds up over centuries in cool swampy, waterlogged conditions such as bogs and fens and to a lesser extent swamps and marshes. Representing just three per cent of the Earth’s landscape, peatlands like those in the Hudson Bay Lowlands can store five times more carbon than the Amazon rainforest. Collectively, they store twice as much carbon as all of the world’s forests.

They also play an outsized role in filtering water and mitigating floods, drought and wildfires, such as those that loomed large in British Columbia this year. Had a large fen near Fort McMurray not been drained in the 2000s, it might have slowed the 2016 Horse River fire long enough for firefighters to gain control of it and avoided the evacuation of 88,000 people, according to Sophie Wilkinson, a peatland scientist at McMaster University.

Canada, endowed with more pristine peatland than any other country, has a unique opportunity to preserve, and in some cases restore these ecosystems, found on the tundra, in temperate and boreal forests, in the Rockies and the Great Lakes region such as Georgian Bay.

Not only do they play an oversized role in managing climate change, regulating water and protecting critically endangered species such as caribou and whooping cranes, they offer denning sites for polar bears, turtles and Massasauga rattlesnakes. They also nurture many of the 546 plants that Indigenous people use for medicine.

Global restoration efforts

Russia and Germany are not the only countries investing heavily in peatland restoration. China has successfully done this in the Zoigê Plateau, the most extensive mountain peatland in the world, after 700 kilometres of drainage ditches were dug in the 1960s and 1970s to provide more grazing for yaks. The restored fens now filter and store freshwater for tens of millions of people.

In the United States, the Fish and Wildlife Service is rewetting badly degraded peatlands in the Great Dismal Swamp, a protected peatland on the border of North Carolina and Virginia, and Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, in North Carolina, to mitigate wildfires and floods and to keep carbon in the ground.

Great Britain and other European countries are doing the same to restore biodiversity and to meet their climate change goals. The sale of horticultural peat that is extracted from bogs and fens will be banned in Great Britain in 2024.

Peatland under threat

Canada has been slow to recognize the many virtues of peatlands. Oilsands operators continue to drain and clear them to extract bitumen. Hydro projects like Muskrat Falls will flood or disturb them with cutlines. Mining companies, like the 18 that have 1,300 claims in Ontario’s so-called “Ring of Fire” in the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, will dig them up and build roads through them if their developments go ahead. And cities like Calgary have drained peatlands to make way for urban developments.

Calgary recognized this mistake. It paid the price in 2013 when an epic rain-on-snow event in the Rockies sent a wall of water downstream. The worst flood in Canadian history may have been mitigated had there been peat to sop up some of the water. Sphagnum, one of many mosses that are the foundation of peat, holds 15 to 26 per cent of its weight in moisture, according to John Pomeroy, Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change from the University of Saskatchewan.

The battle for the ‘breathing lands’: Ontario’s Ring of Fire and the fate of its carbon-rich peatlands

But that flood would have been even worse had the beaver-managed Sibbald Fen and adjoining forest in Kananaskis country been degraded, as the southwestern Rockies may be if coal developments there are allowed to move forward. In interviews for my book Swamplands, Pomeroy and his colleague Cherie Westbrook have underscored the need to protect alpine fens and forests.

While other countries, including the U.S. and the Republic of Congo, have mapped out their peatlands, Canada has not. The limited information makes it difficult to protect them.

Peatland maps

Peatland mapping has produced some surprising results, including the discovery of 14 million hectares of tropical peatland in the Congo basin in 2017.

Not all fens cover areas as extensive as those in the Congo and boreal forest. Mountain fens in the U.S. tend to be very small. They cover one per cent of the land surface in the Beartooth Mountains of Wyoming and one per cent of the San Juan Mountains in Colorado.

In each case, the distinct nature of these mountain fens play an oversized role in supporting insects, plants and animals and in storing water and carbon. Small peatlands such as the 18 inventoried in Wyoming contain 32 threatened plant species, four of which are found nowhere else in the state.

Over the past two decades, David Cooper, a wetland and riparian ecologist from Colorado State has, along with colleagues, identified thousands of high elevation fens that were previously unknown or unappreciated for what they were. The numbers in some cases are mind-boggling.

In the 2000s, 1,738 fens covering 11,034 acres were identified in the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests. Ninety per cent of these fens were found at elevations ranging from 2,700 to 3,600 metres. Cooper estimates there are more than 2,000 fens in the San Juan mountains alone, ranging in size from 0.2 to 20.5 hectares.

No one knows how many fens there are on the Canadian side of the Rockies because no one, including Parks Canada, has looked as closely.

150 billion tonnes

Many scientists continue to underestimate the virtues of peatland ecosystems because of the dearth of plant and animal species. This is true if you compare the peat-rich boreal forest region to the Amazon rainforest. But it is a false slight for all the other ecosystem services that peatlands offer.

One to three billion birds fly north to the boreal peatlands of North America each spring to breed, resulting in three to five billion of them migrating back in fall.

Saskatchewan peat moss mining project faces opposition from Indigenous communities, conservationists

Scientists like Mike Waddington at McMaster University, Line Rochefort at Laval University and Jonathan Price at the University of Waterloo, have the expertise to restore Canada’s peatlands. David Cooper is helping, as is Dale Vitt, a former University of Alberta botanist who pioneered the art of restoring peatlands. Yet their numbers are few, as are their funding sources.

If Canada wants to change course, it needs to catch up with what the rest of the world is doing in restoring and protecting peatlands. Thirty per cent of the world’s soil carbon stock is found in the world’s peatlands. Canada contains a quarter of that — 150 billion tonnes that are still in the ground.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

I was aboard the 364-foot Russian research-cruise ship Akademik Ioffe when it came to a violent stop after grounding on a shoal in a remote region of the Gulf of Boothia in Canada’s Arctic. Fortunately, none of the 102 passengers and 24 crew members were injured. Chemical contaminants that may or may not have been pumped out with the bilge water seemed to be minor.

It could have ended up a lot worse. I was on the ship representing Yale Environment 360, which commissioned me to report on climate change in the Arctic and the research that scientists and students with the U.S. National Foundation sponsored Northwest Passage Project were to be conducting on that three-week voyage.

It took nearly nine hours for a Hercules aircraft to fly in from the Canadian National Defence Joint Rescue Centre in Trenton, Ont., 12 hours for another DND plane to come in from Winnipeg and 20 hours for a Canadian Coast Guard helicopter to fly over. By then we were boarding the Akademik Vavilov, a Russian sister ship that had come to the rescue.

Passengers aboard the Russian research/cruise ship Akademik Ioffe watch a Canadian military aircraft fly overhead as they wait to be rescued after running aground on a shoal in the Arctic. Photo: Edward Struzik

Dangerous scenarios

Had the weather not worked in our favour and had there been thick ice such as the kind we had sailed through hours earlier, we would have faced a number of challenging and potentially dangerous scenarios.

Powerful winds could have spun us around on that rock, possibly ripping a hole into the hull that might have been bigger than the one that was presumably taking in the water we saw being pumped out of the ship. Thick ice grinding up against the ship would have made it almost impossible to get everyone off into lifeboats.

I had warned about a scenario like this in my book Future Arctic, Field Notes from A World On The Edge. Only 10 per cent of the Arctic Ocean in Canada, and less than two per cent of the Arctic Ocean in the United States, is charted. Only 25 per cent of the Canadian paper charts are deemed to be good. Some of the U.S. charts go back to the days of Captains Cook and Vancouver and the time when the Russians owned Alaska.

I’m not the only one who has been raising the red flag. Arctic experts such as Rob Huebert, Whitney Lackenbauer, Michael Byers and the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development have all highlighted the rising risks of shipping in the Arctic, and the formidable challenges associated with timely search and rescues and the staging of oil spill cleanups.

Groundings have increased

Since the catastrophic grounding of the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1989, the list of groundings of fuel tankers, drilling ships, cargo ships and passenger vessels plying the waters of the North American Arctic has risen significantly.

Most notable among them were the cruise ship Hanseatic, which ran aground in the Canadian Arctic in 1996, the Clipper Adventurer which ran aground in Coronation Gulf in 2010 and the Nanny, a fuel tanker that ran aground near Baker Lake in 2012 in an area where marine investigators say there is little margin for error. It was the fifth grounding in that area since 2007.

Passengers disembark the Akademik Ioffe after the Russian ship ran aground in the Canadian Arctic. Photo: Edward Struzik

As sea ice continues to recede in the Arctic, it provides cruise, cargo and tanker companies with new opportunities, and emboldens small vessels to venture into uncharted areas. A recent analysis suggests that the average Arctic ship route has moved more than 180 miles closer to the North Pole in the past seven years. Mines such as the one at Mary River on Baffin Island are planning to use ships to transport their ore. Bigger cruise ships such as the Crystal Serenity that sailed through the Northwest Passage with 1,000 passengers and 600 crew members in 2017 are beginning to test these opportunities.

No rescue ports

There are other factors portending future disasters. There are no ports in the North American Arctic from which to stage a rescue or an oil spill cleanup.

Icebreakers are few and far between. The U.S. Coast Guard has just one in operation. Canada has a few more, but many of them are well on their way to being decommissioned.

Weather forecasting capabilities are poor due to the shortage of meteorological stations and the increasingly unpredictable nature of Arctic weather. Powerful summers storms such as the record-breaking summer cyclone that tore through the Arctic in 2012 are on the increase. Stable shorefast ice is letting go in unpredictable ways.

Our ship, for example, was forced to make a last-minute change to the starting route because of ice that was blocking passage into Resolute Bay. Recognizing the challenges, two cruise companies reportedly cancelled their expeditions this year on short notice.

There is a lot that can and needs to be done to reduce future risks. The Canadian government could compel ships to use forward looking multi-beam sonar with Bluetooth technology. Charts can and need to be updated rapidly. More weather stations are needed. The dumping of bilge water should be banned. A search and rescue team should be seasonally based in a strategic part of the Arctic. An Arctic port is needed sooner rather than later.

There is also a need to determine what impact future shipping will have on beluga and narwhal migrations.

There is time to play catch-up because there are few signs that shipping companies are in a hurry to exploit the short cuts that the Northwest Passage offers between the Atlantic and the Pacific. But the number of partial transits will increase as cruise ships, mining companies and future oil and gas activity focus their eyes on the Arctic.

As things stand now, we are not prepared.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.