Climate change project driven forward at Space Park Leicester

A major project which wants the Earth’s peatlands to be properly managed to help curb climate change has staged its latest event at Space Park Leicester.

WorldPeatland is funded by the European Space Agency and is focused on developing effective tools to monitor peatlands based on freely available Earth observation data. This is because peatlands – despite only covering three per cent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface – store as much carbon as the collective sum of all life and ecosystems on Earth’s land surfaces.

Unlike most other terrestrial environments, peat soils show the potential for ongoing growth which means they can act as continuing sinks of atmospheric carbon and so if suitably managed and preserved could moderate the impact of humans on the global climate.

Last week, WorldPeatland held an outreach workshop at Space Park Leicester which was attended by participants representing a range of peatland experts and other interested organisations.  

Among those in attendance was Professor Sue Page MBE, from Space Park Leicester and the University of Leicester’s School of Geography.

She said: “The workshop provided an opportunity for the project team to present all the products, methods and tools that they have developed and also encouraged participants to explore the extensive datasets available for peatland analysis.”

Professor Page was also joined at the event by fellow Space Park Leicester experts Professor Kevin Tansey, of the University of Leicester’s School of Geography, Geology and Environment, and Harika Ankathi, a Master’s Student in Satellite Data at the University of Leicester.

The Leicester group was joined by a team from Assimila UK, who are the project leads, and the other project partners from INGV in Italy and the University of Leuven, Belgium.