A Bog Worth Keeping: Creative Climate Action Fund awarded for major cross-border project

We are very excited that An Taisce has been selected as an awardee of the Creative Climate Action Fund for A Bog Worth Keeping. Led by An Taisce, this major cross-border project brings together diverse partners to foster bog stewardship through creativity, collaboration, and community engagement.

Background

‘A Bog Worth Keeping’ is a three-year creative climate action project rooted in the Sliabh Beagh peatlands, spanning County Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland and Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone in Northern Ireland. The project uses art, storytelling and creative participation to support cultural and behavioural change around peatland protection. 

Working with communities whose identities and histories are closely connected to the bog, it explores how relationships shaped by extraction can evolve into care and stewardship. Through artist-led listening, co-creation, immersive artworks and new community roles as bog custodians, the project supports a just, place-based transition that is grounded in dignity, memory and participation. 

Long-central to its work, An Taisce enables environmental behaviour change through education, participation and enduring stewardship. It manages lands, including peatlands, and delivers large scale climate and biodiversity programmes with communities and public bodies nationwide. 

As a steward of land within the Sliabh Beagh landscape, this project is grounded in place and ensures continuity and legacy beyond the funding period. Its education and engagement expertise underpins the project’s behaviour change approach, supported by established systems for delivering publicly funded, multi-year programmes. 

A Bog Worth Keeping will draw on external advisory help to support narrative framing, ethical storytelling and respectful engagement with lived heritage, recognising the distinctiveness of bogs and wetlands as complex ecological and cultural landscapes shaped by memory, labour, language, identity and long-standing community relationships with land. This will include guidance informed by experience from peatland and wetland restoration initiatives in Ireland, as well as wider expertise in just transition and community-based environmental practice. 

Key to the project is to hold, interpret and communicate the stories of these landscapes and communities with care and integrity, ensuring that storytelling approaches remain grounded in lived experience while engaging with the emotional, cultural and social complexities of transition from extraction to stewardship. It will also help ensure ecological credibility, alignment with best practice and policy, and that creative and narrative elements remain firmly grounded in restoration principles.

Irish Peatland Conservation Council (IPCC) 

The Irish Peatland Conservation Council (IPCC) is a national organisation with decades of experience in peatland conservation, biodiversity protection and environmental education. IPCC specialises in translating ecological knowledge into lived understanding through field based learning. IPCC will help leading educational engagement on Sliabh Beagh. Working with artists and participants, IPCC will support encounters with the bog’s biodiversity, sounds and seasonal rhythms, building ecological literacy and grounding creative practice. This educational role is central to fostering informed care, responsibility and long-term stewardship. 

RSPB Northern Ireland

An Taisce is already working with RSPB NI on a large-scale, long-term specialist priority bird species conservation project in Sliabh Beagh. Appropriate knowledge-sharing of this important work supporting red-list species such as Hen Harrier on the site will be incorporated into the project. 

Local communities

The project focuses on communities whose lives, families and identities are closely connected to the Sliabh Beagh peatlands, particularly those with direct or inherited experience of turf cutting. The wider local community, including neighbours, landholders and informal opinion formers, is also engaged, recognising that norms around land use are collectively shaped. 

Engagement will include respectful dialogue with stakeholder groups connected to historic and current peatland use, including representative bodies such as turf cutters’ associations, ensuring the project operates sensitively within a contested cultural landscape. Conservation organisations, wetland networks and community based environmental groups will also be engaged as contributors to shared learning, without positioning any single group as representative of the whole. Engagement in County Monaghan will be supported by Monaghan County Council in an enabling capacity, with aspiration to develop equivalent cross border relationships in Northern Ireland. 

Engagement will also be informed by shared learning from other peatland and wetland projects across Ireland, ensuring the project reflects evolving best practice while remaining sensitive to local context. 

Thanks so much to Creative Ireland, Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment, Department of Culture, Communications and Sport and EirGrid Group for this amazing support.

We are delighted to begin this creative climate action journey with A Bog Worth Keeping, bringing together communities, artists, partners, and stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to collaborate, share knowledge, and create lasting positive change.

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