Ponda Wins Innovator of the Year at the Pride in Our Planet Awards
At Ponda, we have long admired the energy, creativity and determination behind RE-PEAT’s work. Their commitment to championing peatlands and the communities who depend on them - feels both urgent and deeply inspiring. RE-PEAT is a youth-led collective working across Europe, using creative advocacy to give peatlands the attention they deserve. Bringing together voices from art, science and activism, its members are united by a shared love for these vital ecosystems and a fierce commitment to protecting them.
Youth-led activism is essential in responding to the climate crisis, and it is always energising to connect with others who care about wetlands as deeply as we do. Over the coming months, we’ll be collaborating with RE-PEAT on a number of projects, but first, we wanted to introduce their brilliant team to the Ponda community. We’re delighted to sit down with them to explore how RE-PEAT began, the role of art in activism, and why peatlands deserve a much louder voice in the climate conversation.
To begin, could you share the story of how RE-PEAT first came to life? Where did the idea spark from, and how did it grow into what it is today? What are your best achievements in this time period?
Looking back now, it’s clear that September 2019 is a sort of BP and AP situation for a few of us: before peatlands and after peatlands. It was at this time that Bethany and Frankie were in Germany for a climate camp, which was set up to protest against a big chemical fertilizer company. They ended up spontaneously joining a peatland excursion and finding out about how vital peatlands are for the climate. On the bus ride home totally transfixed in this new mission, the name “re-peat” jokingly emerged. Since then, more and more people “re-peated” this moment of BP/AP, and so we formed a collective with many time-travelling multi-perspective starting points.
Over the course of the last five years together, we’ve learnt a lot more about peatlands. We have travelled across land and sea to visit them, listened to memories and built our own relationships with these landscapes. We’ve seen the importance of finding playful, metaphorical, collaborative, and imaginative ways of relating with peatlands and sharing their peculiar values. In return, the peatlands have guided us through explorations of grief, deep time, intergenerational thinking, migration, extraction, culture and more.
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Since starting RE-PEAT, what is one of your favourite or most surprising things you’ve learned about peatlands?
People often think about peatlands as wet places, but when they are dry they become places that attract fire. Zombie fires can smolder underground for weeks, months and in some cases years… waiting in the shadows for the right moment to emerge into the light and reignite the world above. The idea of zombie fires is totally ominous, but also strangely magical in the way that they escape our view and our control. This is why peatlands, when kept wet and healthy, are such important mitigators of fire and drought. With their absorbent properties, they can also help prevent flooding. Peatlands are vital, intelligent regulators of landscapes, they are ecosystems we urgently need to care for and protect.
Wetlands and peatlands are often overlooked in climate discussions. Why do you think they remain so underrepresented, despite their huge ecological importance?
Wetlands and peatlands are often overlooked in climate discussions because of how they have been framed culturally and politically. They are frequently portrayed as wastelands, as “scary” or “empty” places. As landscapes to be drained rather than valued, making their ecological richness easy to ignore. Their degradation is also a form of slow violence: like the frog in hot water metaphor, the impacts unfold gradually and go unnoticed until it’s too late. For example in the Netherlands, soil subsidence from drained peatlands happens slowly, yet over time the land sinks by meters. Restoring peatlands is also slow. It requires landscape-wide agreement and collaboration between many actors, which is far harder to organise than restoration efforts focused on a single plot of land, such as forests.
We delivered one of the largest peatland exhibitions to date, Limbo, created in collaboration with De Proef, a former horticultural school in the peat-rich province of Drenthe in the Netherlands. Inspired by the region’s long history of peat extraction, the exhibition brought together over 25 artists from around Europe, working across sound, data, video, and cartography to present peatlands as culturally complex landscapes rather than mere carbon stores. Alongside the exhibition, we hosted side-programming including lino-printing, artist talks, and a paludi dinner, pairing historical context with clear calls to action and significantly expanding the cultural and political visibility of peatland justice in the Netherlands.
The crowdfund supported the exhibition on a limited budget, ensuring fair artist compensation and enabling an interactive public programme, documentation, and a booklet that extends the work beyond the exhibition itself. Through over 200 pledges we reached just over €10,000! We are deeply grateful for the global network of supporters who made this possible.
Images from the Limbo exhibition taken by Caroline Vitzhum
We are delighted to share that Ponda has been named Innovator of the Year at the inaugural Pride in Our Planet Awards, selected by an independent judging panel chaired by the UK’s Climate Minister, Katie White OBE MP, from more than 300 entries.
The award was presented last night at The Conduit in London and recognises organisations across the UK delivering meaningful progress for climate and nature.
Created by climate creator Sam Bentley and delivered in partnership with Sky and The Conduit, the Pride in Our Planet Awards were established to spotlight the people and organisations driving real environmental impact, often without wider recognition beyond their immediate communities. Taking place ahead of London Climate Action Week, the awards are intended to become an annual fixture in the UK climate calendar.
For Ponda, this recognition is especially meaningful. It comes at a time when the need to restore nature at scale has never been more urgent, and when the question of how to fund and deliver that restoration is becoming central to the climate conversation.
Being selected from such a large and diverse field of entries is an important validation of the approach we are taking: that restoring ecosystems like Britain’s wetlands is not only an environmental necessity, but can also be built into a viable and scalable business model.
At Ponda, we have always believed that nature recovery and commercial success do not need to be in opposition. In fact, we believe they must be aligned if we are to restore ecosystems at the speed and scale required. Britain’s degraded peatlands and wetlands represent one of the country’s most powerful natural climate assets, with the potential to deliver carbon storage, biodiversity recovery, water regulation, and long-term economic value when restored properly.
This award reflects growing recognition of that opportunity, and of the work being done by many organisations across the UK to turn it into reality.
We are proud to have been named alongside a diverse group of winners working across community action, regenerative ocean farming, climate communication, and habitat restoration. Each of them reflects a different but connected part of the broader transition to a more regenerative economy.
We would like to thank our partners, collaborators, and supporters for their continued belief in our mission. Most importantly, we thank our investors for backing an approach that seeks to prove that large-scale peatland restoration can create lasting environmental and economic value.
This milestone belongs to everyone who has supported the journey so far. We are still early in what it will take to restore Britain’s wetlands at scale, but recognition like this strengthens our conviction that it is both necessary and achievable.
We are excited for what comes next.
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