Restoring UK peatlands could be key to slowing climate change

Though today, our interest in these waterlogged landscapes tends to be more prosaic. Because of a lack of oxygen, they can build up vast quantities of organic matter that doesn’t decompose properly. This is known as peat.

Peatlands could contain as much as 644 gigatons of carbon – one-fifth of all the carbon stored in soil on Earth. Not bad for a habitat that stakes a claim to just 3% of the planet’s land surface.

Peatlands were once widespread throughout the UK but many have been dug up, drained, burned, built on and converted to cropland, so their place in history has been forgotten.

But while most of the debate around using natural habitats to draw down carbon from the atmosphere concerns planting trees and reforestation, some ecologists argue that a far better solution lies in restoring the peatlands that people have spent centuries draining and destroying.

In medieval Britain, people harvested peat from fens, heaths, moors and bogs which were carefully managed and protected as common land.

From all these habitats, people had the right to cut peat for fuel and as a building material.

Plants that grew in peatlands were also harvested. Cut willow, or ‘withies’, were used in construction, while reeds, sedges and rushes were used for thatching. And these habitats offered abundant grazing for livestock and wildfowl like geese, not to mention fish that thrived in ponds.

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As the 20th century wore on, remaining peatlands were harvested on an industrial scale for compost to satisfy Britain’s burgeoning passion for gardening.

All this exploitation released carbon dioxide, stored for thousands of years, to the atmosphere. Scientists have calculated that peat digging on Thorne Moors near Doncaster caused about 16.6 million tonnes of carbon to leak to the atmosphere from the 16th century onwards.

That’s more than the annual output of 15 coal-fired power stations today.

With so much demand on land, from growing food, to building houses and generating energy, it’s tempting to ask why we should make room for peatlands.

But peatlands once provided all of these things and more. Recasting them as an ally in the fight against climate change only scratches the surface of their future usefulness.

*The full version of this article appears at theconversation.com

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