 Climate change is the crisis of our time, and it's happening faster than we ever feared. But it is a race we need to win for our own surviving. Ecosystems are the silent heroes of our planet. Absorbing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, they are one of the most effective tools we have in tackling the climate crisis. And the most important ecosystem in the race to save our climate are peatlands, which is my field of research. Did you know that peatlands only cover 3% of the global land area, but that they store twice as much carbon as all global forests, locking it away in their soil, and protecting us from the worst effects of global warming we could ever imagine? Unfortunately, some of the global peatlands have been drained for conventional agriculture, a total of about the size of Germany. But these release 5-6% of the entire world's man-made greenhouse gas emissions, a catastrophic amount. But why is that? Simply, peatlands are areas whose soil is peat, which is made up of dead plants. When growing, plants take up carbon from the air, and when the plants on wet peatlands die, the carbon is stored in the soil. But it is with peat, as with pickle cucumbers. If you keep it wet, it lasts forever. But if you remove the water, it rots away. And that is why peatlands drained for agriculture are such huge sources of emissions. But here's the good news. Manage properly these extraordinary ecosystems can recover and play a critical role in helping us to turn the tide in the fight against climate change. One solution of management is polluting culture, which is a new way of sustainable agriculture on rewetted peatlands. In my research, I cultivated grasses adapted to wet peatlands and found that we can use their protein as a high quality alternative to soil for animals. But most importantly, I found that with polluting culture, we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from Danish peatlands by 44 to 145 percent while keeping up biomass production, thereby turning some areas from sources into sinks of carbon. With my research, I show that rewetting of peatlands is an extremely powerful tool to quickly mitigate climate change. We will not be able to tackle the climate crisis without rewetting of peatlands. And for this, polluting culture is the change we need for the future we want.