Newsletter #4: Following the Earth’s Lead

We hope you’re enjoying summer and getting out into nature.

We’re excited to share that our team has completed installing water control structures at Pocosin Ecological Reserve I — just ahead of 3” of rainfall!

This month we bring you a reflection on where the land stores most of its carbon — and why climate work should follow it underground, from our Chief Restoration Ecologist Steve Apfelbaum.

Looking ahead to September, we’re starting to fill our calendars for NYCW. If you’re also coming to New York, our team would love to see you!

Curious about our peatland restoration project and the credits we will be issuing in the next year? Looking for a partner in restoring the ecosystem on your land? Want to see how Stratifyx can help uncover the ecological and economic value of your land?

Reach out here with what you’d like to chat about and your availability during Climate Week.

Following the Earth’s Lead

By Steve Apfelbaum, Chief Restoration Ecologist

Carbon is everywhere. It is not a needle in the haystack; it is the currency of life, cycling endlessly through air, water, soil, and living tissue. That ubiquity poses a strategic problem: if carbon is everywhere, where should we concentrate our effort and capital to reduce climate risk — and can we choose that focus so the same acre also protects water and shelters biodiversity? Those questions have organized my career, and the answer was written into the earth’s own history long before we began asking.

I first found it in the early 1990s, working as a fire ecologist in the boreal forest — the largest intact forest on earth — across the Boundary Waters and Quetico. The data were perplexing in the best way: fire, long treated as a catastrophe for nature, did the opposite. After a burn, biodiversity rose. Light-starved plants flushed into the open; ruffed grouse and goshawks moved in; resprouting aspen and maple drew moose, and wolves followed; the burned ground threw up thousands of pounds of morels the next spring. Smokey Bear, the era’s spokes-creature for the idea that fire is bad for nature, was generalizing from a single concern — the timber. On biodiversity he was wrong, and, as I would learn, on carbon too.

The carbon lesson came when we sampled those same landscapes for fire’s effect on the soil. Fire does not erase a forest; it converts it — to soot, to charcoal, to carbonized wood that resists decay and holds moisture. Across the boreal belt, those cool, saturated conditions feed the slow accumulation of peat. Summed together — soil carbon, fire-hardened wood, and peat — the store below ground holds far more carbon, and far more durably, than the living forest above it.15 In one old-growth stand near 490 years old, we dug beneath the moss and peat and found carbonized trunks of trees that had died more than five centuries earlier, still holding their carbon underground.16

That reframed the whole question: where, and how, has the earth stored its carbon over deep time — and shouldn’t the soundest climate strategy be to emulate that fingerprint? Read honestly, the fingerprint points down, not up. Most terrestrial carbon is not in vegetation but in soils — very roughly 1,500 to 2,400 gigatonnes, against 450 to 650 in all living plants. The planet keeps its most durable carbon cool, wet, dark, and underground.

That reorders the priorities. Peatlands come first: about 3% of the land, yet 20 to 25% of all terrestrial carbon — arguably the single largest and densest store on earth, rivaling all the world’s forests in a fraction of the footprint, and carrying the steepest emissions penalty when drained or burned. Next, the soils of agriculture, grassland, and savanna — approximately half of the land and roughly a third of terrestrial carbon, nearly all of it in soil. Then the world’s remaining wetlands, small in area but rich out of all proportion; coastal blue carbon, tiny in extent but extraordinarily dense; and forests, about a third of the land — with nearly half of their carbon, too, held in the soil.

So the earth’s fingerprint became our north star: protect and restore peat, soil carbon, wetland carbon, and coastal blue carbon, and, around that core, the fire-shaped systems that share the same logic — longleaf pine, light ground fire in forested peatlands and boreal stands, oak and pine savanna. Properly qualified, the revelation is hard to argue with: the carbon in the earth’s peatlands rivals all the carbon in its forests, and the soil pool, as a whole, dwarfs everything standing above it. That is where a serious climate-de-risking program should begin — and it is where we have chosen to begin, at the Applied Ecological Institute and Pantheon Regeneration.

Following the earth’s lead is the through-line of a career now in its fifth decade. The premise is the earth’s, not ours: find the processes that built the planet’s largest, most durable carbon stores; protect them where they survive; restore them where they are lost; and scale those solutions where they matter most. The table that follows lays out the evidence.

Methodological notes

1. Denominators. Land-area percentages are expressed relative to global ice-free land ≈ 13 billion ha (≈ 130 million km²) — the same base FAO uses for its “forests = 32%” figure. Carbon percentages are relative to total terrestrial carbon: soil organic carbon ~1,500–2,400 Gt (to 1 m depth) plus vegetation ~450–650 Gt.

2. Two modes of disturbance emission. Drained organic-soil systems (peatlands, wetlands, salt marsh) emit an ongoing annual flux (reported per year) that continues for decades after disturbance; biomass-dominated systems (forests) and grassland/soil conversion release a largely one-time stock pulse. Each cell states which applies. Per-acre values convert published per-hectare figures at 1 ha = 2.47 acres.

3. Uncertainty. All disturbance figures carry wide uncertainty and depend on climate zone, water-table depth, soil type, and disturbance intensity. IPCC Tier-1 default emission factors are used where a single representative value is given; site-specific (Tier 2/3) values can differ substantially.

References

[1] UNEP (2022). Global Peatlands Assessment — The State of the World’s Peatlands. Global Peatlands Initiative / Greifswald Mire Centre. (Peatland area ≈ 4.9 million km²; carbon stock 500–700 Gt C.)

[2] IUCN (2021). Peatlands and Climate Change — Issues Brief. International Union for Conservation of Nature. (>3 million km²; >600 Gt C; peat ≈ 44% of all soil carbon; drained-peat emissions ~1.9 Gt CO₂e/yr.)

[3] IPCC (2014). 2013 Supplement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National GHG Inventories: Wetlands (“Wetlands Supplement”). Tier-1 emission factors for drained organic soils (e.g., temperate cropland ≈ 7.9 t CO₂-C/ha/yr ≈ 29 t CO₂/ha/yr).

[4] FAO (2023) / Food Forward NDCs. Improved management practices in grasslands. (Grasslands ≈ 40% of global land surface; store ~34% of terrestrial carbon, ~90% in soil.)

[5] Bai, Y. & Cotrufo, M. F. (2022). Grassland soil carbon sequestration: current understanding, challenges, and solutions. Science 377:603–608. (Grasslands hold ~one-third of terrestrial carbon stocks.)

[6] Ramsar Convention Scientific & Technical Review Panel. Wetland carbon and extent syntheses. (Wetlands cover ~6–9% of the land surface and store up to ~35% of terrestrial carbon.)

[7] International Peatland Society; Craft, C. (2016). Creating and Restoring Wetlands: From Theory to Practice. Elsevier. (Global wetland area ≈ 5.7 million km².)

[8] USGCRP (2018). Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR2), Ch. 13 — Terrestrial Wetlands. (Organic-soil wetlands/peat hold ~80% of wetland carbon.)

[9] McOwen, C. J. et al. (2017). A global map of saltmarshes. Biodiversity Data Journal 5:e11764; The Blue Carbon Initiative. (Mapped salt-marsh area ≈ 5.5 million ha.)

[10] Restore America’s Estuaries / Pendleton et al. Coastal Blue Carbon. (Salt-marsh sequestration ~218 g C/m²/yr ≈ 8 t CO₂e/ha/yr; soil stock ~186 t C/ha.)

[11] Pendleton, L. et al. (2012). Estimating global “blue carbon” emissions from conversion and degradation of vegetated coastal ecosystems. PLoS ONE 7(9):e43542.

[12] FAO (2025). Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025 — Key Findings. (Forest area 4.14 billion ha ≈ 32% of land; carbon stock ≈ 714 Gt, 172 t C/ha, 44–46% in soil.)

[13] Pan, Y. et al. (2011). A large and persistent carbon sink in the world’s forests. Science 333:988–993; WRI Global Forest Review. (Global forest carbon ≈ 861 Gt C.)

[14] Harris, N. L. et al. (2021). Global maps of twenty-first-century forest carbon fluxes. Nature Climate Change 11:234–240; and R. A. Houghton deforestation-emission syntheses. (Land-conversion / deforestation carbon losses.)

[15] Apfelbaum, S. I., & Haney, A. (2023). Fire and climate change in the North American Great Lakes pine transition forest. In L. Zhang, S. Wang, & L. Liu (Eds.), Mitigating global climate change — Enhancing adaptation, evaluation, and restoration of mountain ecosystems. IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110734

[16] Apfelbaum, S. I., Haney, A., Wang, F., Burris, J., & Carlson, J. (2017). Old-growth southern boreal forest stability and response to a stand-replacing wildfire. Natural Areas Journal, 37(4), 474–488. https://doi.org/10.3375/043.037.0404

Note on units: 1 Gt C = 1 Pg C = 1 billion metric tonnes carbon. To convert carbon to CO₂, multiply by 3.67. 1 ha = 2.47 acres.