Aeco GmbH

Aeco is a start-up that aims to become the leading private, collaborative developer and financier of peatland restoration projects across Europe, and beyond.

Why peatlands?

Because they are essential, and it’s urgent. Healthy peatlands are incredible carbon stores. Despite making up only 3 % of the world’s land area, they contain nearly 30 % of global soil organic carbon - twice as much as all the world’s forests. Drained peatlands however release their carbon into the atmosphere. In Europe, more than 50% of peatlands are degraded. Restoring them to avoid and, in the ideal case, remove emissions is crucial to fight the climate crisis as they make up around 5% of total global emissions. In addition, they are super important for biodiversity and restoring a functioning water household at landscape level. But currently, neither the speed nor the scale of peatland restoration are anywhere near to what is needed to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C. In Germany, for example, we would need 200 years to rewet all peatlands at the current speed, while we only have 15-20 years.

How do we make a difference?

In a slow-moving sector dominated by subsidies, entrenched interests, and public / philanthropic approaches to rewetting the occasional lighthouse project, we want to inject private sector dynamics and collaborative approaches that incentivize all stakeholders. More precisely, aeco covers all costs for the implementation and certification of outcomes and shares yearly revenues from the sale of carbon certificates with the landowner (in the future we will also assess and monetize other ecosystem services). Farming can be continued in many cases and can be adopted to gradually rising water tables.

Our core expertise lies, next to building a strong network of strategic partnerships (such as regional restoration NGOs which can be incentivized to help develop, implement and manage projects on the ground), in the evaluation, planning, supervision of implementation, monitoring, certificate sales and engineering the right mix of funding at project and portfolio levels. Our current geographical focus is on Germany, Poland, the Baltics, and the UK. We are also starting to explore the potential in Ukraine.

We have already rewetted the first peatland, are preparing the implementation of five additional projects under international carbon standards and together with our partners have already screened more than 75 potential project sites. To speed up implementation time and improve the current state of technology in accurately monitoring the state of our rewetted sites we are in the process of developing new carbon methodologies for peatland restoration and a state of the art remote peatland MRV system with our partners.