Our economics team organised a great event yesterday. Yes, we have an economics team who are playing a vital role in mapping the ways that nature can avoid being the silent victim of the impending cuts.
Yesterday could have been a gloom-laden affair looking at just how bad things can be – but it wasn’t. It’s going to be tough but the un-missable tone behind yesterday’s event was optimistic.
Now, economics is a subject I find tough to follow – I’ve never quite got the hang of internalising the externalities (or is that the other way round) and I had to look up the meaning of fungible which sounds, at first hearing, like a new cake – but then I am on a diet. So huge credit to Professors Dieter Helm and Ian Bateman for their clarity and insight. Mark Avery, our Director of Conservation can save me having to repeat the highlights of the afternoon – you can read his blog here.
As always, at such events, there is a chance to catch up with friends and colleagues you haven’t seen for a while and the conversations can be illuminating. One of the options we identify in the report that goes with the conference (here’s a link) is the development of levies on fertilisers, pesticides and peat (working in ways similar to the current aggregate and landfill taxes). Such an approach can raise revenue for conservation but in the case of damaging peat extraction, can build pressure to end the wholesale destruction of peatland sites.
Many moons ago I was involved in surveys and campaigns to save the remnant lowland raised mires of Greater Manchester and Merseyside. Even a quarter of century ago, we were up against significant odds, land drainage, development pressure and peat mining were rapidly encroaching on these beleaguered sites. We did have some success – Red Moss, in near Bolton Wanderers stadium, was spared the fate of being converted to a landfill site after a massive community-based campaign. Other remnant mosses weren’t so lucky.
Yesterday I caught up with some of my old haunts when I met David Crawshaw representing Lancashire Wildlife Trust at our economic gig. Astley Moss, where I counted nightjars in the early 80’s, has had it’s peat mined out to depths that revealed the underlying sand – which has now been quarried, a narrow, drying, cracking ring of peat is all that remains. And Chat Moss – where tattered fragments still remain and is the subject of a campaign to save it.
Despite all the efforts of so many over so long, despite wise words and good intentions from the planning authorities the economics of peat continue to drive the destruction. If it’s the economy that’s driving the stupidity – the argument for economics to fix the issue through taxing peat extraction is compelling.
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