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This commentary reflects on the experiences of a cohort of human and physical geographers in enacting environmental collaborations during their doctoral studies. The authors identify three key structural barriers encountered whilst attempting a collaborative approach: (1) doctoral funding priorities, (2) doctoral resourcing and (3) assessing doctoral collaboration. The authors discuss how the negotiation of these encounters came to frame their understanding of collaborative approaches to environmental knowledge creation. Competitive application processes for doctoral studentships can encourage the overpromising of the impact of planned environmental collaboration, potentially co‐opting the voices of partners/communities to satisfy doctoral funding requirements. Given insufficient funding of collaborations, the authors argue that this overpromising of doctoral research's impact can later result in difficult trade‐offs between undertaking additional commitments at the expense of the career progression of the doctoral student, contributing to educational inequalities and scaling‐back the initial plans at the cost of collaborators encountering environmental crises. The trade‐off is further problematised by institutional assessment procedures that do not adequately recognise the more nuanced contributions of environmental collaborations and a prevailing culture promoting peer‐review publishing. Overall, the commentary argues that these barriers help to reproduce inequalities in the distribution of voice in environmental scholarship, undermining efforts to democratise environmental knowledge creation in doctoral research. The authors call for specific structural reforms of doctoral programmes to help address these challenges and support a broader resistance to the inadequate resourcing and evaluation of environmental collaborative research in UK higher education. This commentary reflects on the experiences of a cohort of human and physical geographers in enacting environmental collaborations during their doctoral programmes. We draw attention to the key structural barriers we encountered. Going forward, we call for specific structural reforms of doctoral programmes to help address these challenges and support wider environmental collaborative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peatlands are globally important ecosystems but many are degraded and some are eroding. However, some degraded peatlands are undergoing apparently spontaneous recovery, with switches from erosion to renewed carbon accumulation—a type of ecological regime shift.We used a palaeoecological approach to investigate and help understand such a switch in a blanket peatland in North Wales, UK.Our data show: (a) a rapid accumulation of new peat after the switch from the eroding state, with between 5.2 and 10.6 kg/m2 carbon accumulating since the beginning of the recovery which occurred between the late 1800s and early to mid‐1900s CE, with an average carbon accumulation rate in the new peat between 46 and 121 g C m−2 year−1; (b) three main successional pathways in peat‐forming vegetation and (c) hydrological changes with an increase to moderately high water‐tables after the switch that promoted new carbon accumulation as well as protecting vulnerable old carbon. External factors, including changes in climate and industrial activity, can only partially explain our results. Following previous studies, we suggest that internal ecosystem processes offer a substantial part of the explanation and interpret the switch to renewed carbon accumulation as a bifurcation‐type tipping point involving changes in the physical form of the eroded landscape.Synthesis. Our long‐term ecological data reveal a switch from a degraded peatland with active erosion and loss of carbon to a revegetated, wetter peatland accumulating carbon. The switch can be interpreted as a bifurcation tipping point. We suggest that external factors such as climate and pollution levels are important for setting suitable boundary conditions for peatland recovery, but internal mechanisms can explain the change in peatland state. Our study is the first of its kind to apply tipping point theory to the internal mechanisms linked to peat erosion and recovery and may help improve understanding of the trajectories of other peatlands in a changing climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]