Protecting the Peatlands

 Peatlands are among the greatest stores of carbon, trapping billions of tonnes in places as remote as Kamchatka and Sakhalin in Russia, the Falkland islands and Tierra del Fuego.

Ecologists estimate that while peatlands cover only 3% of the Earth’s land surface, they hold 30% of the carbon stored on land. 

They calculate the Flow Country’s peatlands,  an area of about 1,400 sq km of the most pristine peatland in Caithness and Sutherland, are up to 15 metres deep after more than 10,000 years of plant deposition and expansion, alone hold 400m tonnes of carbon – roughly twice the total carbon content of all the woodlands and forest in the UK.

Prof Des Thompson, NatureScot’s principal science adviser, explained, “It’s the single largest peat deposit in the world and therefore it’s the single largest carbon repository in the world; it’s the world’s largest in terms of one block, one expanse of blanket bog. If they are intact and functioning well, they are absolute life savers. But where they are degraded and pouring out carbon, an absolute liability,” Thompson said. “It’s so vital to restore them, to preserve our carbon balance.”

Peatlands are under sustained threat from climate change, which is warming the chilly and moist northern and southern latitudes where peatlands thrive, and also by agriculture, commercial forestry and industrial expansion. They release carbon as they dry out, fragment and degrade. On contact with air, the dry particles oxidise into carbon dioxide. In central Scotland, 60% are degraded; across the Pennines of England, 85% are damaged; on Exmoor it is 90% and in Wales 50%. Up to 85% of Ireland’s substantial peatlands in Kerry, Wicklow, Donegal and Connemara, strip-mined to fuel power stations and supply garden centres, are degraded.

In the UK, aggressive action funded by previous governments to dry out peat moorland has contributed to flooding of large towns and cities. So, too, has significant forestation of peatlands, subsidised by successive governments and previously used as tax-avoidance investments.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which owns 22,000 hectares of the Flow Country. The RSPB has felled about 1,000 hectares of forestry from its land. The RSPB plans to remove all the forestry on its reserve and the miles of road cut through the peat for forestry machinery.

 “It was inappropriate planting: it shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” said Darrell Stevens, the reserve manager.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/13/world-heritage-status-for-scottish-peat-bogs-could-help-uk-hit-net-zero-goals