Monday, February 03, 2025

ECON. 101

The Confusions of Donald Trump: the Case of Supply and Demand

February 3, 2025
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Donald Trump is the world’s leading expert in getting things wrong and one thing he gets wrong bigly is the value of the U.S. domestic market. Trump seems to believe that our domestic market is incredibly valuable to the rest of the world and that access to it should allow him to extort large concessions from the rest of the world. This is a seriously wrong understanding of the world economy.

The basic point is a simple one, when other countries sell us things, they are essentially giving us a portion of what they are able to produce for dollar bills. Because they give us a portion of what they produce, they have less to consume or invest domestically. It’s sort of like if you bake a cake and give a slice to your neighbor, that leaves less for you and your family. In that sense, selling things to the U.S. makes them poorer.

This doesn’t mean they are hurt by the trade. They can use the dollars they get from the U.S. to buy stuff from us, or they can use it to buy things from third countries, or they can hold the dollars in reserve in case they are needed in the future. But at the most basic level, the more goods they sell to us, the less they have to use at home.

Suppose Donald Trump gets angry at a country and says that he won’t let them sell to the United States anymore. In this situation they have to figure out what to do with the goods they expected to sell here. They can look to sell them to another country or possibly use them at home. Both outcomes are somewhat worse from the standpoint of the country Trump is angry at.

If they sell them to another country, they will likely get a lower price for their goods, otherwise they already would have been selling them there. If they use them at home, that could improve people’s living standards, but not as much as what they hoped to get from selling the stuff to the U.S. and doing something with the money.

But this is a short-term story. In the longer term they can look to alter their production to either meet domestic needs or to better fit the needs of a different foreign market.

But note that the issue here is excess supply. The problem is not that the exporting nation isn’t producing enough to meet its own needs, the problem is that it’s producing more of at least some items than is needed for its domestic market. If the U.S. blocks imports, the country doesn’t have a shortage of goods and services, it has excess supply.

This is the step that seems to go over Donald Trump’s head. If other countries needed the United States for some essential supplies, like food or oil, then the threat to cut off access could seriously cripple their economies, possibly for a long period of time. But Donald Trump apparently thinks he can cripple foreign economies by not buying their stuff.

This sort of threat is at most a temporary problem. Countries can and will reorient their production to meet the needs of other markets and just leave the United States out of the picture.

Also, it is important to remember that countries never literally need someone to buy their stuff. That is a story of too little demand, the problem we confronted at the start of the Great Depression. But we learned the trick for getting out of this problem, it’s called “spending money.”

We did that in a huge way when the United States got pulled into World War II in 1941. That quickly eliminated our problem of too little demand. But it was the spending, not the war, that did the trick. If we had the political support for it, we could have done massive spending in 1931 on things like building up infrastructure, and improving our health and education systems. That would have ended the depression a decade sooner.

China is in a similar situation today where its major economic problem is too little demand. It can address this problem by helping other countries to get over their transition from dependence on the United States. Of course, it can also meet the problem by spending more at home, for example improving its health care and Social Security systems. They also could send everyone a $2,000 check, like we did during the pandemic. If President Xi has a sense of humor, he could even put Donald Trump’s name on the check.

But the basic story is the world can find other ways to meet any demand shortfalls it faces. And when it comes to supply, there is little that the United States produces that other countries could not replace elsewhere.

This is the trade story that gets Donald Trump so upset. We import $4 trillion in goods and services each year, but only export $3 trillion. If we run down the list of exports from the U.S. most items can be replaced reasonably quickly. We export roughly $300 billion of petroleum products, which accounts for 15 percent of our goods exports. A world rapidly moving towards clean energy will be able to survive without this oil, if Donald Trump chooses to eat it himself rather than sell it.

We also export a lot of planes and capital equipment. European, Chinese, Brazilian, and Indian manufacturers would be happy to fill this gap. On the service side, one fifth of our exports is tourists coming to the U.S. Most foreign tourists would probably be fine going to a country that is not an international pariah. Another big item is travel on U.S. airlines. There are plenty of non-U.S. airlines that could carry these passengers instead. And we have $140 billion in payments for patents and copyrights, fees that I’m sure other countries could live without if the U.S. goes rogue.

The simple story here is that if Donald Trump is determined to act like an idiot in dealing with international trade, he can cause short-term disruptions. But in the longer term, the rest of the world could do just fine without the U.S. market.

In that story, the U.S. economy will be the big loser. Trump with his various scams may be just fine. His rich friends with their big tax cuts may come out alright also, but most ordinary working types will likely be looking at lower standards of living. The U.S. market is not the big prize Trump thinks it is, and we will likely pay a big price for Trump’s confusion on this issue.

This first appeared on Dean Baker Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.

Boris Kagarlitsky: Trump’s uncertain foreign policy

By Boris Kagarlitsky

Published 2 February, 2025

First published in Russian at Rabkor. Translation by Aleksandra Zobova, which was edited by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal for clarity.

A new US administration is always global news. The world awaited George W Bush’s arrival at the White House with fears that came to be confirmed, while Barack Obama’s election was accompanied by hopes that were not fulfilled. But never before has a new occupant in the Oval Office been observed with such confusion and bewilderment. No one quite knows what to expect of Donald Trump’s presidency. Which is only natural, as he himself does not know.

This eccentric elderly billionaire has returned to power with a set of populist slogans that sound threatening enough to scare US liberals, but give absolutely no clue as to the priorities and strategies of his foreign policy. Yes, Trump intends to fight the influx of immigrants from Latin America, as well as Chinese competition in the domestic and global markets. But these priorities are clearly not enough for a global superpower and world hegemon, which the US still remains.

The issue is that Trump’s rise has been accompanied by a unique ideological crisis, in which all the usual principles of US politics are being called into question. For decades, there was a bipartisan consensus in Washington regarding basic values and priorities when it came to foreign policy. Of course, there were arguments, occasionally quite heated ones, but these concerned tactical questions, not strategic ones. The strategic principles that successive administrations adhered to (regarding Europe, the former Soviet Union, Russia, Latin America, Middle East, etc) were perceived as an objective reflection of national interests. Importantly, it was not only the governing elite, but US society, that shared this vision.

The exception, of course, was the left, which harshly criticised US intervention in any part of the world. The problem was that they criticised US policy from the point of view of its victims, as if they themselves were on the outside, without offering either their own alternative vision of national interests or a strategy that could be implemented in practice. As a result, the left became further marginalised and had zero influence on foreign policy discussions.

The situation with Trump is brand new. He publicly questions generally accepted strategic principles (for instance, North Atlantic solidarity), but offers no coherent alternative. He is alien both to the bourgeois morality of the government elite and critical morality of the left. The US must be “great” again, but it is unclear what this slogan really means: make the state great or simply return to some “great” time in the past.

How will US foreign policy change in practical terms? As strange as it seems, the changes may end up not being so significant. In a situation where goals, values and priorities seem unclear, the State Department’s apparatus and the Pentagon, like any bureaucracy, will operate by inertia. There might be some curveballs caused by the personal interference of an absolutely incompetent president. But it is more likely that the resulting political course will be steered in a usual fashion.

Does this mean that the uncertainty generated by Trump will not affect international relations? No, it will — and quite significantly. But it will not so much affect the actions of the US as the behaviour of other actors. In uncertain times, some become highly cautious, others try testing boundaries, others again seek to establish their own rules. This is likely to create the conditions for change.

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which did not suit either party, is a direct consequence of this new uncertainty. It is clear that Israel is afraid of the US leaving the Middle East, while the Islamists dream of such a scenario. But as different as their approaches are, the two sides of the conflict were forced to act in the same manner. Hamas leaders choose not to provoke the new administration; better for them to let the conflict fade from memory for now and keep a low profile. Israel, in turn, realised that if it did not give Trump this present in time for his inauguration, the country might fall out of grace with Trump. So the two hostile parties negotiated unwillingly, glancing back not as much at each other as at the unpredictable Big Brother in Washington, who presumably enjoys this kind of arrangement.

It is far from clear that changes will necessarily be for the better, but the spontaneous process of realigning international relations is imminent. Moreover, this is most likely to be just one of the dimensions of the global systemic crisis. As for the US, I cannot help but think of a bull in a china shop: even if it stands still, its presence is impossible to ignore.

Killing the Constitution at Guantánamo

When British kings wanted to dispose of troublesome enemies – real or imagined – they often had them or their colleagues arrested on pretextual charges and then brutally tortured until confessions were extracted. The confessions were then read aloud during so-called trials; and, of course, the defendant was convicted of whatever crime was the subject of the confession.

All this was done in order to satisfy the political, and in many cases the personal, desires of the monarch by creating the impression of due process.

Often the torture occurred in remote places, so remote that there was no government there, and the king and his counselors could argue that the protections of the British traditions of fair play – the British do not have a written Constitution, but rather a set of traditions – was not violated because the torture occurred in a place where the traditions did not apply.

When one of the victims of this practice was an official who had previously engaged in perpetrating it, the House of Commons, many of whose members feared becoming victims of the monarch’s desires, adopted the principle of habeas corpus. That ancient right compelled the jailer of any person anywhere to bring the jailed person before a neutral magistrate and justify the confinement.

Due process has numerous definitions and aspects, but for constitutional purposes it basically means that all charged persons are presumed innocent and entitled to a written notice of the charges, a speedy and fair hearing before a neutral fact finder, a right to appeal; and the entire process imbued with fairness and a profound recognition of personal innocence until guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Due process also explicitly prohibits the use of torture.

In order to ensure that due process and habeas corpus would trump the whims of government officials – stated differently, to ensure that the British system of torture and confession and conviction did not occur here – James Madison and the Framers crafted protections in the Constitution to which all in government needed to swear allegiance and support.

Fast forward to the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and you can see the constitutional system turned on its head.

This George W. Bush-crafted American Devil’s Island, which costs $500 million a year to operate, once held 780 prisoners, allegedly there due to their personal involvement in the war on terror against the United States. Not a single one of them has been convicted of 9/11-related crimes, and only one former detainee is currently serving time in an American federal prison.

Nearly all the prisoners were tortured, and most were captured by roving militias and sold to American forces for bounties. Last week, under cover of darkness, the Biden administration released 11 detainees, all of whom had been at Gitmo for 20-plus years and none of whom had been charged with a crime.

The best known of the remaining 15 prisoners is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the government claims was the mastermind of 9/11. Mohammed was scheduled for trial when the military judge in his case retired. The new judge – the fifth on the case – was confronted with the daunting task of reading 40,000 pages of transcripts and documents concerning the torture of Mohammed by U.S. personnel.

At the same time, a new team of military and civilian prosecutors was assigned to the case and the new prosecutors told their bosses in the Pentagon and the new military judge that unlike their predecessors – who sought to mitigate the 183 torture sessions U.S. personnel administered to Mohammed – they were prepared to acknowledge it and decline to use any evidence obtained from it in the courtroom.

This remarkable turnaround – one that rejected the premises upon which Gitmo came into being – resulted in the prosecutors commencing plea negotiations.

The Bush-inspired premises of Gitmo were that since it is located in Cuba, federal laws don’t apply, the Constitution doesn’t apply and federal judges can’t interfere. In five landmark decisions, the Supreme Court rejected all these premises, and the new team of prosecutors and the new judge recognized as much.

The prosecutors basically said that they cannot ethically defend torture, they will not offer evidence derived from it in the case, and the case is difficult to prove without evidence derived from torture. This is a remarkable lesson to be learned. Instead of cutting holes in the Constitution, follow it. Instead of using torture, use acceptable investigative techniques. Instead of crafting a Devil’s Island, use the systems in place that have basically worked.

The settlement negotiations produced an agreement for a guilty plea that removed the death penalty from the case, required Mohammed to answer truthfully all questions put to him under oath and in public by prosecutors, defense counsel and lawyers for 9/11 victims’ families, and life in prison at Gitmo; not America’s hellhole in Florence, Colorado.

The plea was approved in writing by all, including the retired general in the Pentagon in charge of Gitmo prosecutions – herself a former military appellate judge. When Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin learned of the plea agreement, he instructed the military prosecutors to move to vacate the agreement they had instigated. The trial judge denied this unique request. Last week, a military court of appeals upheld that denial. Mohammed’s courtroom plea will now take place before President Joe Biden leaves office.

None of this jurisprudential mess would have occurred if Bush had allowed the criminal justice structure to proceed unimpeded. The use of torture, rotating judges and prosecutors, and incarceration for 20 years without charges or trial are all hallmarks of an authoritarian government. If justice consists in convicting the guilty using established norms and fair procedures, Gitmo has been an unjust unhumanitarian disaster. But if justice consists in the king getting whatever he wants, then the Constitution is useless as a protector of freedom.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

How the West Hides Its Gaza Genocide Guilt Behind Holocaust Day Remembrance

An entirely mendacious message lay at the heart of this week’s coverage by the BBC of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.

The British state broadcaster asserted throughout the day that the voices of the few remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination programme were still being heard “loud and clear” in western capitals. Those survivors – now in their 80s and 90s – warned that the genocide of a people must “never again” be allowed to take place.

As if to bolster its claim, the BBC showed western leaders – from Britain’s King Charles III, to Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron of France – prominently in attendance at the main ceremony at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps, where more than a million Jews, Roma and other stigmatised groups were burned in ovens.

As a counterpoint, the BBC highlighted the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been excluded from the ceremony for ordering the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Steve Rosenberg, the corporation’s Moscow correspondent, underscored the irony that Russia, so visibly absent, was responsible for liberating Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 – the date that eventually came to be marked as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But hanging over the proceedings – and the coverage – was a heavy cloud of unreality. Had those western leaders really heard the message of “never again”? Had media outlets like the BBC?

There was an unwanted ghost at the commemorations. In fact, tens of thousands of ghosts.

Those ghosts included the children shredded by US-supplied bombs; the children who slowly suffocated under the rubble of their destroyed homes; the children whose bodies were left to rot, picked apart by feral dogs, because snipers shot at anyone who tried to retrieve them; the children who starved to death because they were seen as “human animals”, denied all food and water; the homeless babies who froze to death in plunging winter temperatures; and the premature babies left to die in their incubators after soldiers invaded hospitals and cut off the power.

Those ghosts were every bit as present at the ceremony as the mountains of shoes and suitcases – separated forever from their owners – lining the corridors of the Auschwitz museum.

Western leaders were determined to look back at the crimes of the past, but not to look at the crimes of the present – crimes they have been so deeply complicit in perpetrating.

Wasteland of rubble

The BBC’s News at Ten, its main evening news program, dedicated around 20 minutes of its half-hour schedule to the Auschwitz commemorations, and then immediately followed the segment – apparently with no sense of irony – with images from Gaza, now a wasteland of rubble.

Video footage, shot by a drone from high above, showed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – the survivors, if Israel does not restart the slaughter – picking their way along the coast northwards. They were heading towards the ruins that had once been their homes, schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches and bakeries.

Seen from so far away, they were reduced to a mass of “human ants”, just as Israel’s leaders wish them to be seen.

After all, who needs to protect a people so dehumanized, so demonised? A people whose resistance to decades of brutal oppression and dispossession is categorized simply as “terrorism”?

It was entirely of a piece that US President Donald Trump, who at least stayed away from the orgy of western hypocrisy at Auschwitz, called at the weekend for a program to “clean out” the destitute, the maimed, the scarred from Gaza – as if this was just a matter of good hygiene, of eradicating an ants’ nest.

Media like the BBC reported his comments with faint distaste. But it was precisely the media’s disengaged treatment of the horrors unfolding in Gaza for the past 15 months – as if Israel was simply carrying out a routine counter-terrorism operation, “mowing the lawn” again – that made the horrors possible.

It was the media’s refusal to identify those horrors for what they clearly were – an incipient genocide, recognized by every major human rights organization and suspected by the International Court of Justice in a ruling a year ago – that made the slaughter possible.

It was the media’s embrace of the preposterous narrative that former US President Joe Biden had “worked tirelessly” to restrain Israel, at the same time as he shipped to its military the most powerful bombs in Washington’s armoury, that made the genocide possible.

At least Trump, in his vulgar transparency, exploded the pretence of decency, making it impossible to take as good-faith the professions of “never again” paraded by western leaders.

Ideological zeal

But the Auschwitz commemoration also highlighted a much older lie than the West’s current, self-serving, mendacious claim to have internalised the central lesson of the Holocaust while assisting a present-day genocide.

This year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day starkly exposed the chief beneficiary of that lie: Israel.

For decades, Israel has traded on its self-declared status as guardian of the Holocaust’s memory, and as the Jewish people’s supposed solitary sanctuary from global antisemitism.

But Israel was never a real sanctuary for Jews. It was always another ghetto, this one a self-created fortress state antagonizing and oppressing its neighbors in the oil-rich Middle East.

Israel was never a bulwark against genocide either. It was the bastard child of genocide – bitter, traumatized and driven by an ideological zeal to do unto others what had been done to it.

And Israel was never an antidote to antisemitism. It was always antisemitism’s junkie, needing another hit to give it the illusion of purpose and meaning, to rationalize its crimes to itself and others.

Israel did not learn the lesson of “never again”. It learned to view the world as a giant extermination-camp-in-waiting, where no one and nothing could be trusted; where life was seen as a zero-sum battle for survival; where wielding the biggest stick eased its fears a little; and peace was unattainable, so the state of war had to be permanent.

Touting itself as the realization of a dream for the Jewish people, Israel offered only a nightmarish hellscape for the Palestinians it has ruled for nearly eight decades.

The nadir of that long process was the 15 months of genocide in Gaza.

Litany of tyrants

The remedy to all of this is not a mirage-like “two-state solution”, which could never be accommodated by Israel’s dog-eat-dog worldview. Rather, Israel must be weaned off its addiction to victimhood, its zero-sum logic.

But western politicians were never in a position to help. Instead, they endlessly armed Israel and encouraged its most dysfunctional behaviors.

In truth, even in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War, the West never learned the lesson it so keenly and loudly proclaimed this week at Auschwitz.

Just ask the Kikuyu people of Kenya, who were castrated, beaten, raped and murdered through the 1950s by British soldiers defending a dying empire from the Mau Mau uprising. Or the Algerians, colonised and brutalised until the early 1960s by French imperialists clinging on to one of their last significant colonial outposts.

Ask the Vietnamese, who were massacred in the service of a Cold War strategy by the US to bolster its expanding economic empire against the spread of a rival communism. Or the Iraqis and Libyans, who saw their countries bombed, and their peoples killed or ethnically cleansed as Washington and its Nato allies pursued the US military doctrine of “global full spectrum dominance”.

And those are only a handful of the post-Holocaust crimes committed directly by western states.

Even as the West pretended to bring independence to its former colonies, from the 1950s onwards, it propped up a litany of brutal tyrants and dictators: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Indonesia’s General Suharto, the leaders of apartheid South Africa, the kings and crown princes of Saudi Arabia – the list goes on and on.

The brutalities of western colonialism were veiled by outsourcing the crimes to local dictators and strongmen.

Glaring hypocrisy

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made an address on Holocaust Remembrance Day that encapsulated how its message has been not only lost, but entirely twisted by western politicians.

Pointing to his country’s plans for a National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, Starmer vowed to achieve more than just remembrance. “We must also act,” he said. And with a hypocrisy so glaring it nearly snuffed out the many dozens of candles arrayed behind him, he listed the recent genocides the West failed to stop.

He solemnly intoned: “We say ‘never again’, but where was ‘never again’ in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, or in the acts of genocide against the Yazidi people? And where is ‘never again’ as antisemitism still kills Jewish people?”

Notice no mention of Gaza, where the destruction and slaughter has already happened on a far greater scale than in Bosnia. Starmer, like other western leaders, not only failed to act to stop the genocide in Gaza, but he had already forgotten it even while its survivors were on our screens, destitute and maimed, returning to the wreckage of their homes.

Starmer wants Holocaust education to become “a national endeavor”. But British children don’t need to hear about events 80 years or more ago to learn about genocide. They watched it unfold day after day, week after week, month after month on their phones.

And they watched Starmer and his counterparts across Europe not only do nothing to stop it, but actively assist Israel in committing those crimes. Children will not learn more about the dangerous world they live in from Auschwitz than they have already learned from Gaza.

Cover for criminality

But there is another lesson that young people – those not brainwashed by a lifetime of exposure to BBC news – might have understood from the commemorations at Auschwitz: that the message from Holocaust survivors of “never again” has been hijacked by western leaders to a quite different, cynical end.

The Holocaust has been turned into a shield that, rather than protecting others from becoming victims of genocide, is used to protect those in the West who wish to perpetrate it.

Over the years, the Holocaust has become the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for Israel – and for western leaders who can invoke it as cover for their support for Israeli criminality.

It was no surprise that, in rationalizing its genocide in Gaza, Israel first spread wholly false stories that Hamas had baked babies alive in ovens, evoking the crematoria of Auschwitz. Or that Israeli soldiers, high on their conviction that they belong to an eternally victimized master race, repeatedly used vehicles to carve giant Stars of David onto Palestinian lands in Gaza.

It is no surprise that Israeli popular culture has so dehumanized Palestinians that report after report finds those imprisoned by Israel face systematic torture, sexual abuse and rape. Or that Israeli soldiers regard Palestinians as so vermin-like that, as western doctors who have volunteered in Gaza keep warning, Israeli snipers and drones appear to be shooting Gaza’s children for sport.

The truth is that the primary lesson of the Holocaust, like the reality of antisemitism, has been weaponized. It has been hollowed out of its true message – the message from the survivors – so that it can be cynically repurposed to justify the very crimes it should serve as a warning against.

We cannot unsee what has taken place in Gaza over the past 15 months. Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t succeed in shifting our attention back 80 years, as western leaders hoped it would. Rather, it brought the present into much sharper focus.

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.

Launch of the most comprehensive, and up to date European Wetland Map

A new European Wetland Map shows Europe's peatlands, floodplains and coastal wetlands more comprehensively than ever before in one map. Compiled from about 200 data sources, this map informs policy makers, land users and anyone interested in wetlands

European Science Communication Institute gGmbH

The European Wetlands Map - Europe — image:
The European Wetlands Map
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Credit: ALFAwetlands, WET HORIZONS, EU, Greifswald Moor Centrum

2nd February 2025 Greifswald/Aarhus/Helsinki - On time for World Wetlands Day, the European Wetland Map (‘EWM’) significantly enhances knowledge of wetlands across Europe by locating, assessing and merging the latest geospatial data. It combines various geographic information system (GIS) data on wetland types and their distribution on mineral soil in coastal environments, floodplains, and a large variety of peatlands in one most comprehensive, easily accessible resource. 

"Over a period of two years, we collected, checked and merged more than 200 geodata on wetlands and especially peatlands from various sources. Now we are happy about this standardised dataset that makes widespread European wetlands visible and enhances their analysis, understanding and management," says Cosima Tegetmeyer of Greifswald Mire Centre, one of the map’s developers.

Users can freely download the European Wetland Map for their own analyses. Politicians can find out where current land use and infrastructure might be at increasing risk by flooding in times of climate change and adjust decisions accordingly. Land users and landowners can recognize where their land overlaps with peatlands and wetlands – even if wetland features are no longer visible due to drainage, as in many of Europe’s former extensive floodplains and peatlands.

  “The released European Wetland Map represents a significant step forward, for example in assessing climate mitigation and biodiversity policies for the European Commission. It allows more effective modelling of scenarios related to climate mitigation and nature restoration policies, thus aiding policymakers in coming to more informed, science-based decisions,” says Juraj Balkovic, research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

  A vector dataset on the geographical distribution of the wetlands considered is available on a country basis in an ArcGIS geodatabase and a country-specific high resolution Geo-TIFF collection (grid size: 1 arcsecond, i.e. ⁠1/60⁠ of one degree).

Background: The World Wetlands Day (WWD) (Link: www.worldwetlandsday.org)
This day has been drawing attention to the importance of wetlands, including peatlands, on February 2nd every year since 1997. The Ramsar Convention, the international agreement for the protection of wetlands, was adopted on February 2nd in 1971. Since 2021 the WWD has been recognised as an international day by the United Nations.

Their restoration and protection is important. Wetlands (including peatlands) are under threat worldwide or have already been destroyed due to pollution, drainage and agriculture, fires and overfishing. Yet they are guarantors of biodiversity and climate protection. Among other things, wetlands offer people protection from drought and flooding, purify water and regulate the microclimate. In Germany, 95 % of former wetlands have been drained and are no longer recognisable as such today. 

  ALFAwetlands and WET HORIZONS:
The European Wetland Map work is part of the research and innovation projects “ALFAwetlands- Wetland restoration for the future” (Grant Agreement No. 101056844) and “WET HORIZONS” (Grant Agreement No. 101056848), funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Program of the European Union. 

Links:
World Wetland Day: www.worldwetlandsday.org
European Wetland Map: Tegetmeyer, C., & Kaiser, M., Barthelmes, A. (2024). The European Wetland Map ('EWM') [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14717561

Links of issuing organisations:
ALFAwetlands - wetlands restoration for the future project
WET HORIZONS project
www.greifswaldmoor.de

Pictures and material:
You might use the attached picture of the EWM  free of charge in context of reporting on the subject at World Wetlands Day 2025.

“Enhancing wetland mapping was one of the key goalsa key goal of our project, and I am proud to see this achievement realized while also showcasing the successful collaboration between two EU-funded projects,” says Dr. Liisa Ukonmaanaho, senior researcher, ALFAwetlands project coordinator of ALFAwetlands, Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke)

The work is further part of "Building the European Peatland Initiative: a strong alliance for peatland climate protection in Europe" (Grant Agreement No. 81290291). This project is part of the European Climate Initiative (EUKI) of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK).