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 dataset 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 Dataset, with over 500 peatland-affecting policies catalogued across 28 countries and 22 languages, spanning the United Nations, European Union, national, and sub-national levels. Alongside the unified, multilingual policy catalogue, the portal introduces an interactive mapping tool designed 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 dataset 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. In its drive to support systematic policy examination and analysis across countries, governance levels, domains, and languages, the portal aims to bridge efficiency gaps and aid the coordination of European peatland governance. While the portal proposes these tools for peatland policy specifically, the authors argue that the framework is transferable to other land use policy domains that face complex regulatory environments.