For peat's sake! Blanket bogs and climate change

The UK supports 20% of the worlds blanket bog and a recent report by Natural England found that 96% of deep peat (peat more than 1m deep) in England has already been exposed to some degradation. Can saving our peat save our climate?

Earlier this week I joined a visit to the Exmoor Mire restoration project. The event was part of Climate South West’s climate change adaptation week.  The visit looked at the work being done on Exmoor to restore the peat habitats lost due to peat cutting, drainage and moorland reclamation.  The objective is to restore rare habitats such as blanket bog of which there are 30 sq km on Exmoor. Blanket bogs are rain fed peat habitats often found in the uplands where the cold climatic conditions and a wet environment means that plant matter is slow to degrade and is preserved in the waterlogged conditions as peat. The project was established in 1998 and is working on 12 sites. 4300 dams have been built across 50km of ditches using wood, peat and bales.

Since the project started the importance of climate change and water resources has increased politically and with the public.  This has helped to strengthen the case for restoring these habitats.  Healthy uplands and peat lands can store carbon, control river flows and improve water quality and so provide a wide range of benefits – often called ‘ecosystem services’. 

Water companies across the country, such as South West Water and Northumbrian Water have funded a number of these projects as they see the importance of improving water quality within catchments to reduce treatment costs.  The latest stage of the Exmoor project will include the installation of monitoring equipment on a new restoration site to collect data on the impact that the work has on water quality and flow.  In the future hopefully this data will strengthen the argument for supporting more landowners to restore wider tracts of upland peat with funding from utility companies.

What is great about projects like this is that they really demonstrate the wide range of ‘win-win’ opportunities that come from acting on climate change. We are still a long way from fully rewarding the value that these ecosystem services and land management systems provide, but it is encouraging to see the progress projects such as the Exmoor Mire restoration are now making.

Adam Lockyear is a Climate Change Adviser for the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, FWAG provides practical advice to farmers on environmental issues within their business.

More information about the Exmoor Mire restoration project and others can be found at http://www.peatlands.org.uk/.

Read Robin Tucker’s (Natural England) article on peatlands and climate change here.

Read our Water Management fact sheet.