Torres Vedras (June 3, 2024)- Peatland protectors from around the world signed The Venice Agreement 2024 in Torres Vedras, Portugal on World Peatland Day (June 2) and renewed their commitment to changing the trajectory of the ecological and cultural management of these critical wetland ecosystems. The Venice Agreement is a unique effort to build decolonial leadership and assert the rights of peatlands through transdisciplinary collaborations and a bottom-up approach that recognizes local initiatives as key collaborators in the global process of peatland conservation. Conceived as a living document and a tool for conservation, it addresses climate crisis and biodiversity loss through direct conservation actions. The Venice Agreement 2024 convening was organized by Ensayos, Wildlife Conservation Society-Chile and the Michael Succow Foundation partner in the Greifswald Mire Center, with support from the interdisciplinary collective Double-u-Replay and the University of Lisbon, Centre for Geographical Studies.
During the two-day in-person meeting, 25 participants –including scientists, artists, activists, governmental representatives, and funders– met at the Municipal Gallery of Torres Vedras, the Center for Sustainability of the Sea and Coastal Zones (Porto Novo) and the Center for Environmental Education (Torres Vedras) to adapt the document to meet emerging needs and discuss the future governance of the growing movement of peatland protection. Additionally, peatland protectors from around the world contributed to the convening through local workshops held from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle. “What are the odds that 122 people gathered in different places in the globe to keep working on the agreement,” said Nicole Püschel of WCS-Chile during the opening remarks on the first day of the meeting. “These peatlands are taking care of everyone; so, people have to care for other people’s peatlands all over,” added Püschel on the significance of connecting local needs to global concerns. Camila Marambio, director of Ensayos, stressed the importance of the collaboration with Double-u Replay and supporting Torres Vedras’s peat mires, in an act of “grounding back into what is needed,” and noticed how participants were willing to travel to work in peatland conservation no matter the size of the peatlands involved.
The original Venice Agreement, which was co-created and signed in the city of Venice in 2022, proposed a set of needs and values based on experiential and research-based knowledge essential to activating the protection of peatlands on a local scale. This time, participants reflected the concrete conservation actions that the Venice Agreement inspired over the past two years, the challenges and opportunities faced by local communities, and how these might be addressed. Participants empathized the value of biodiversity, and how peatlands as ecosystems are protagonists for art and culture, ecological memory sanctuaries, freshwater reservoirs, and crucial actors in mitigation and adaptation to the climate crisis.
Participants at Torres Vedras engaged for two days in dialogue, affective mapping of their peatlands, collaborative writing and editing, defining future governance of the Venice Agreement, and visited local peat mires in the coast that are under risk due to increased tourism and encroaching real estate development. The discussions were nurtured by the experiences of the thirteen “underground workshops” held in localities as varied as Porvenir, Puerto Aysén, and Puerto Williams in Chile; Ushuaia in Argentina; Tromsø in Norway; and Moffat, Scotland. The input from the underground workshops were carefully processed by Antonieta Eguren, Human Dimension specialist from WCS-Chile, and delivered to the group gathered in Torres Vedras to be considered in the decision making. This provided important locally-driven guidelines that emphasized accessible education on peatlands, developing strategic frameworks for effective conservation actions, sharing meaningful resources, and identifying new threats to peatlands, including pollution, public infrastructure, and the growing effects of climate change.
The Venice Agreement 2024 stresses as its values the wellbeing of peatlands for planetary health; bottom-up organization and circularity between the local and global; sharing knowledge; fostering diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion; decolonization and queering; as well as transformative social and environmental land justice. As Patrick Scheel from the Global Peatland Initiative in Kenya commented, “For us the Venice Agreement is a perfect tool for the Global Peatlands Initiative to translate our global efforts, knowledge, science into local and tangible actions on the ground through the collaboration of this multidisciplinary and stakeholders’ group. Through the VA we can understand how the work of local organizations, local governments and local efforts can be addressed at a global scale.” Among the new Venice Agreement needs are the inclusion of peatlands in governmental policy; to effectively protect and restore peatlands, including old and new forms of drainage-free livelihoods; decolonial leadership and local vocabularies and inventories of global peatlands. It recognizes peatlands as ecological memory sanctuaries and the need to care for peatland caretakers, as it draws and enacts new models of ecogovernance.
Caretakers gathered at Torres Vedras included the local hosts José Eduardo Mateus, environmental archeologist and cofounder of Double-u Replay with botanist Paula Queiroz, and art historian Teresa Bray, who received the enthusiastic support of Ana Umbelino, Deputy Mayor of the Municipality of Torres Vedras. Discussions were organized in shifting groups that gathered scientists Miguel Geraldes from Lisbon University, Nicole Püschel from WCS-Chile, and Ignacio Rodríguez from Centro de Humedales Río Cruces; peatland policy makers and advocates Silvina Henninger from the Secretaría de Ambiente de la Provincia de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, Patrick Scheel from the Global Peatlands Initiative (GPI) at UNEP, Leonard Akwany, regional wetlands expert from the Nile Basin Initiative and director of Freshwater at Conservation International, Ireen van Dolderen and Jamie Walker from RE-PEAT, a youth-led collective based in the Netherlands; Jonas Stuck and Marie Telschow from the Andrea von Braun Stiftung Foundation, and curator and researcher Suza Husse from the Michael Succow Foundation and Sensing Peat: Art and Research Network; artists Jasmena Al-Quaisi from Romania and Christy Gast from New York. All these experts and peatland lovers, including graduate students specialized in peatlands from the University of Lisbon joined the sessions, were guided by facilitator Charo Lanao, event organizers Nicole Püschel and Camila Marambio, and assisted by workgroup leaders including art historian Carla Macchiavello and curator and artist Karolin Tampere of Ensayos. Artist Christy Gast refined the editing process and transmitted the changes to designer Rosario Ureta, who redesigned the original agreement to reflect the 2024 revisions. The Torres Vedras VA meeting was accompanied by local Side Sessions for the general public organized along scientific and artistic lines: focused on the peatlands of the Portuguese municipality as natural archives of ecological memory, the cartography of wetlands in the region, replicating local peatlands with game models, introducing the Global Peatland Initiative and PEATMAP to local stakeholders, and engaging in a collective writing exercise on peatland conservation.
The meeting ended on a high note with the redesigned Venice Agreement and a celebration with music by the Camerata da Cotovia at the Municipality of Torres Vedras. For Miguel Geraldes, scientist from the Biogeographical Change and Predictive Models at University of Lisbon, the Venice Agreement was effective in strengthening transnational cooperation and networking, gathering strength from the VA to convince the Municipality in expanding the natural reserve of peatlands –“they didn’t know them, now the word is on their minds” he commented– and growing their motivation in developing local actions for peatland conservation. As Leonard Akwany stated during the closing event, “I feel inspired because I see that my brothers and sisters, whichever corner of the world they come from, are doing something. They have added to my energies, my passion, my ambition, I am going home empowered and even more ambitious. I will work hard to bring the voices of Africa’ peatlands to this global peat pot of peatland conservation. In Africa we have to conserve peatlands for our own good first but also as an example for others to learn from us and to grow the movement of the Venice Agreement.”
Towards the future, the Venice Agreement signatories committed to continue building the movement and put into practice the plans they laid out in terms of communication, the creation of spaces for interaction, linking, and learning about peatlands, and expanding membership. Some of the concrete actions envisioned include initiating a mentorship program to organize the biannual VA meeting, nurturing the community through online gatherings, and developing a web platform. As Jonas Stuck from the Andrea von Braun Stiftung Foundation stated: “I would love to come back in a year and share how this tool was implemented, not just practically as in rewet or protect certain peatlands, but to use the Venice Agreement as a framework to talk to other people and branch out, initiating the conversation.”