Peatland custodians from around the world will meet for three days in Torres Vedras to develop and share creative, transdisciplinary, and locally-led methods for conserving, restoring, and honoring our planet's peatlands. This is the second historic meeting of the Venice Agreement, an international commitment by peatland custodians to change the trajectory of the ecological and cultural management of these wetland ecosystems towards effective conservation. In 2022, the Venice Agreement set a new standard for the valuation and practice of protecting and restoring our planet's peatlands at the local level. This June 2nd, World Peatlands Day, the assembly will present an updated version of the Venice Agreement in a public event to be held at the Municipality of Torres Vedras, Portugal.
Artists, peatland scientists, public officials, Indigenous community members, landmanagers, climate change specialists, and leaders of environmental not-for-profits from as far as Kenya, Norway, Chile, Argentina, Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Estonia, Romania, and the USA will join a local Portuguese contingent to work on renewing, assessing, nurturing and growing the commitments and strategies originally agreed to in the city of Venice, Italy, in 2022 by over 100 peatland custodians during the foundational drafting of the Venice Agreement. The Torres Vedras gathering will use an in-person and on-the-grund model to harvest the Venice Agreement's impacts and potentials, extend its body to include new needs, and connect the growing global peatland community with local initiatives. In addition to the in-person meeting, more than twenty groups from around the world will conduct local workshops prior to the Torres Vedras meeting, which will inform the proceedings in Torres Vedras. The meeting is organized by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Chile, Ensayos, and the Sensing Peat Art & Research Network of the Michael Succow Foundation, Partner of the Greifswald Mire Center, in collaboration with the Municipality of Torres Vedras, the association for environmental memory W-Replay and the Centre for Geographical Studies of the Institute of Geografphy and Spatial Planning of the University of Lisbon. The meeting takes place on the coast of the Torres Vedras region with its three small vestigial adctive peatlands (Vigias da Arriba, Mexilhoeira, and Seixo). These coastal peatlands are remnants of a larger wetland system and play a crucial role both in the ecology and the cultural memory of the region.
