Ley Pompón — Chile's National Peatland Protection Law

After nearly six years of legislative debate, Chile enacted Law 21.660 ("Ley Pompón") in March 2024, removing peatlands from the jurisdiction of the mining code and banning peat extraction nationwide, while establishing a regulated regime for sustainable harvesting of live Sphagnum magellanicum moss - a globally traded horticultural product, mostly exported to Southeast Asian markets. Chile's forestry service (CONAF) estimates the law affects roughly 3.2 million hectares of peatland concentrated in the Los Ríos, Los Lagos, Aysén and Magallanes regions, though academic researchers (CR2, Chile's climate science centre) put Patagonian peatland extent above 4 million hectares - a reminder that national peatland mapping still carries real uncertainty.

The regulation is grounded in documented moss regeneration rates of just 2.5-5 mm per year in Magallanes and about 4 mm per year in Aysén, meaning a harvested 15 cm strand needs roughly 30-60 years to regrow - the basis for the law's harvest-plan and training-certification requirements rather than a blanket ban. Over the 2019-2023 period, official Agricultural Service (SAG) records show 1,357 people nationally had completed the required sustainability training, with 270 harvest plans submitted.

An independent investigation by CIPER Chile found that industry lobbying during the legislative debate progressively inflated employment claims - from 3,000 people (2021) to more than 20,000 families (2023) - none of which were substantiated against SAG's own certification records, and which likely contributed to the final law permitting moss harvest rather than the "complete protection" originally proposed in 2018. The episode is a rare, well-documented case of independent fact-checking holding environmental legislation accountable to real evidence rather than unverified economic claims.

Read the full analysis: https://www.miresofchile.cl/en/peatland-protection-law-in-chile-2024/