Calls to restore a third of UK’s peatland to help in fight over climate change

Experts are calling for a third of the country’s peatlands, covering a million hectares or almost 2.5m acres, to be in good condition or under restoration schemes by 2020. A failure to preserve the UK’s peat areas, which occur both in uplands and in low-lying wetlands, could see billions of tonnes of carbon they store being lost to the atmosphere, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) UK peatland programme’s experts warned.

Peatlands store twice as much carbon as the planet’s forests and are responsible for at least 10 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions, so protecting and restoring them is an effective way of tackling greenhouse gases which cause climate change.

The director of the IUCN UK peatland programme, Clifton Bain, said of the UK: “We are sitting on a compost time bomb with over three billion tonnes of stored carbon in the peat which will be lost to the atmosphere if we don’t return the peatlands to a healthy condition.”

He said there were clear cost benefits to society in avoiding peatland damage, and those benefits should be reflected in support given to land managers for protecting peat areas. A conference of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme in York is launching a new code to provide standards and science to give business confidence their financial contributions are making a verifiable difference to UK peatlands.

Efforts to conserve the region’s spectacular moorlands have already placed Yorkshire at the forefront of a world-wide push to use peat bogs to capture carbon dioxide, one of the main causes of global warming.

The Yorkshire Post revealed last month that leading conservationists had claimed the model used to protect the region’s upland areas could be employed in countries including Russia, Canada and Indonesia which have most of the world’s peaty resources.

A drive is under way to re-wet under-threat bogland areas to prevent them drying out, with the Yorkshire Peatland Partnership has worked on 17 sites as part of a £3m project.

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