WATCH: Beautiful video of Offaly bog published for World Wetlands Day

Thursday, February 2 is World Wetlands Day which seeks to  raise awareness about wetlands to reverse their rapid loss and encourage actions to conserve and restore them. 

Wetlands including bogs, saltmarshes, swamps and wet woodlands, have been destroyed and damaged by millennia of human activity and are further threatened by climate change.

Globally peatlands store two to three times more carbon than the world's woodlands combined and are vital for  climate change mitigation.  The biodiversity of wetlands in Ireland has been estimated to be worth €385 million per year to the Irish economy. 

University College Cork has created  a beautiful video, part funded by the Irish Research Council's COALESCE scheme, about how it is working alongside the local community at Clara Bog in Co Offaly to protect and promote the environmental and cultural values of peatlands or future generations. Irish peatlands preserve a unique archaeological record, such as bog bodies and hundreds of prehistoric trackways, many of which have been lost through peat extraction.

Dr Benjamin Gearey UCC Department of Archaeology said, "around one fifth of the land area of Ireland is peatland,  large swathes of which have been damaged by centuries of drainage and extraction. On World Wetlands Day, we celebrate the work of local community groups who are striving to reverse this trend, and to restore the ecological and cultural functions of peatlands."