The European Peatland Policy Portal: Demonstrating Machine Learning and Analytics Tools for Evidence-based Land Use Policymaking

Achieving the ambitions of the European Green Deal requires overcoming longstanding fragmentation in the policy frameworks that govern peatlands. The EU LIFE Multi Peat project introduces the European Peatland Policy Portal as a novel policy corpus and toolkit to support analysis and evidence-based policy development in this disjointed landscape of peatland policy. The portal presents the first comprehensive European Peatland Policy Corpus, with over 400 peatland-affecting policies catalogued across 27 countries and 22 languages, spanning United Nations, European Union, national, and sub-national levels. Alongside the unified, multilingual policy catalogue, the portal introduces an interactive mapping tool to support spatial policy analysis, as well as a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based question-answering tool that allows users to query the full policy corpus with the power of machine learning. With multilingual comprehension, the RAG tool enables users to interface with policies which would otherwise sit behind a language barrier. By enabling systematic policy examination and analysis across countries, governance levels, domains, and languages, the portal assists the coordination and efficiency gaps of European peatland governance. While this portal demonstrates the efficacy of these tools for peatland policy specifically, its framework is transferable to other land use policy domains that face complex regulatory environments.