Carbon farming is a new approach for fighting global warming that uses enhanced land management and conservation practices to increase the amount of carbon that current or former agricultural lands pull out of the air and lock away in their soil and vegetation. By rewetting and reverting these former drained pocosin peatlands to their natural wetland state, we can significantly increase their capacity for long-term carbon storage. In addition, rewetting these peatlands results in the protection of millions of tons of soil carbon that has been sequestered over thousands of years.
What is a pocosin? It’s a freshwater evergreen shrub bog, or wetland, found in the coastal plain of the Southeastern United States. The term pocosin is an Algonguin Indian word that was translated to mean “swamp on a hill” by early American geologists.
In December 2018, the Duke University Wetland Center and Carolina Ranch a privately owned farm reached an agreement to create a 10,000-acre “carbon farm” on former peatlands that had been drained in eastern North Carolina. In 2024 the farm was purchased by Pantheon Regeneration PBC, renamed as Pocosin Ecological reserve one (PER1) and now can be used as a model system to test carbon (C) restoration designs, biodiversity and resilience theories on the coast of North Carolina.
This nature-based climate solution (NBs) project can be used by NSOE faculty and students over the next 3 to 4 decades to develop new approaches to restoration, promote conservation, increase C sequestration or reduce emissions from drained fallow peatlands formerly used for agriculture by improving hydrologic land management and coastal resilience to saltwater intrusions. Development and marketing of C credits provides an economic base for support of ongoing research and ecosystem enhancement.
This currently is a joint project between DWCC and Pantheon Regeneration PBC.
A five-year study by the DWCC at Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in nearby Tyrrell County and new research on PER1 showed that these peatlands have some of the highest net carbon credit values ever recorded (Richardson et al., 2022, 2023. When restored to their natural state as shrub-dominated bog wetlands, the pocosin peatlands can potentially prevent 8-10 metric tons of carbon dioxide per acre per year entering the atmosphere than drained or unrestored agricultural lands. Left undisturbed, carbon in pocosins can remain stored for millennia due to the unique natural antimicrobial compounds that prevent the waterlogged peat from rapidly decaying and releasing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. The presence of these aromatic compounds acts as a protective mechanism or latch – greatly reducing the release of greenhouse gases, even during periods of drought.