Eurosite is one of the partners in the Care-Peat – Restoring the carbon storage capacity of peatland – project. Within the Interreg North-West Europe (NWE) programme, Care-Peat aims to reduce carbon emissions and restore the carbon storage capacity of different types of peatlands in North-West Europe. The main partnership consists of five knowledge institutes and four nature organisations from Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The project consortium is led by Natuurpunt (Belgium). 

Our main task within Care-Peat is to facilitate the long-term effect of implementation of low-carbon, energy and climate protection strategies to reduce GHG emissions in NWE. Therefore, we were very enthusiastic to participate in a cross-project meeting organized on 4 December 2019 in Roubaix, France. The representatives of Care-Peat met with partners of another Interreg NWE project  – Carbon-Connects, and the Interreg North Sea Region project Canape. We had a fruitful discussion aiming to find synergies between the projects and to strengthen our common results. The meeting conclusions include e.g. organisation of common workshops and conferences, exchange of data and experience and hopefully also the set up of European peatland initiative. 

The meeting was organised as a side-event of the Interreg “NWE making an impact!” conference which was visited by over 350 participants on the 4th and 5^th of December in Tourcoing, France. Attending this very impressive meeting we noticed that between the important and emerging issues of climate change, energy consumption, smart urban development, health care and citizen science, the number of projects covering biodiversity conservation is surprisingly small. Therefore, joining forces with different peatland initiatives is very important to ensure appropriate conservation of such crucial areas for European biodiversity.