More than eight meters of peat lie beneath parts of Scotland’s Flow Country, built up over more than 9,000 years. From above, the northern Highlands can look like a patchwork of dark, wet ground, small lakes and green fields. At ground level, the landscape is often treeless and soft underfoot, covered with mosses, grasses and heathers.
The Flow Country is Europe’s largest blanket bog system, and in 2024 it became the first blanket bog site inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Its recognition draws attention to a landscape that may seem modest but performs an important job: holding carbon that could otherwise contribute to climate change.
In a bog, waterlogged soil slows the work of microbes that break down dead plants. Some plant material remains only partly decayed, gradually collecting as peat. That makes peatlands different from forests, where much of the carbon is held in living trees and can return to the air when trees die or burn. In the Flow Country, peat has accumulated over thousands of years, forming deep deposits that keep carbon stored for long periods.
The peatlands stretch across about 1,900 square kilometers (730 square miles) of the Highlands and are home to more than 30 species of sphagnum moss. They are part of a rare ecosystem: blanket bogs occur where rainfall is abundant, drainage is poor and evaporation is low. Across the entire world, these bogs cover only about 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles), less than one-tenth of one percent of Earth’s land.
The Flow Country is a significant part of a much wider story. Scientists estimate that all peatlands cover about 3 percent of the planet’s land surface, yet store more than 600 gigatons of carbon—about twice the amount held in all the world’s forests combined. That scale helps explain why protecting peatlands matters well beyond the communities and wildlife of northern Scotland.
A NASA image captured by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 shows the contrast across the region. Boggy ground appears dark brown and is dotted with lakes. Near Thurso, farmland is light green, while geometric dark-green shapes in the center mark conifer plantations. The image was taken in spring, when the land is especially waterlogged and bog plants begin adding large amounts of new biomass.
The UNESCO listing gives the Flow Country a place on the world’s map as a natural treasure, as well as a reminder of the value of landscapes that do not look dramatic at first glance. Its deep peat is the work of many millennia; keeping that carbon in the ground depends on caring for the bogs that hold it.