• June 10, 2025

Stakeholder-Informed Development of the Peatland Policy Portal

The LIFE MultiPeat project held national meetings this past winter in each of its partner countries to discuss the Peatland Policy Portal and its ongoing development with key stakeholders. 

The Peatland Policy Portal is a public toolkit that showcases and analyses peatlands, restoration projects, and the policies that affect them across all levels of governance. The portal aims to deliver tangible impacts in the conservation of peatlands and the management of agriculture on peat soils through the provision of tools informed by expert input. The kinds of tools in the portal range from calculation, to reference, to policy analysis and development, enabling them to aid a diverse collection of users.

In order to ensure that our portal and its tools are as useful and user-friendly as possible, we conducted stakeholder meetings in Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands in December 2024 and January 2025 to present and receive feedback on the website and its content. In these meetings, we prioritized users in the areas of policy, ecology, land management, and research, but we envision our portal being used even beyond these domains.

Attendance across the five workshops included representatives from government departments and ministries, environmental agencies, academic institutions, and several NGOs. Feedback on the portal was largely positive, especially coming from people in the policy area who believe the final version of the site will be a central resource for exploring the peatland policy landscape in different areas. Additional feedback provided useful insight into important policies and data to include in the portal, as well as suggested improvements on the design and capabilities of the portal and its tools.

Since the meetings, the portal’s development is progressing in two directions: on the content side, we are adding information either highlighted to be missing in the meetings or identified as gaps in our data collections, and on the structural side, we are incorporating technical feedback to improve the user interface alongside the creation of our remaining AI tools for policy analysis. We look forward to sharing our improved portal as we progress through the project, and welcome further feedback in order to continue our user-centered development.

You can access the portal here: https://peatlandpolicyportal.eu/map

Contact: [email protected]