Climate calls the curlews back?

We’re calling for 200,000 hectares of upland peatlands in England to be restored.

Perhaps not a surprising call for a nature conservation organisation to make. But why are two water companies among our partnership of 12 organisations seeking this – and why are you reading about this on the RSPB’s climate change blog?

First of all, England upland peatlands are in a fairly terrible state. Only 4% are in good ecological condition and actively forming peat, according to a recent Committee on Climate Change (CCC) report. Even our SSSIs there are in poor condition – only 10.5% of those above 300 metres are listed by Natural England as being in favourable condition. So clearly something needs to be done.

Intensive burning and drainage measures on a Natura 2000 deep peatland site in the Pennines

Our upland peatlands are not just wonderful wild places, with a special richness of wildlife. They also give a lot to people and society. They form the headwaters of much of our drinking water supply; and they can slow flood water. They store carbon - vast amounts of it, slowly accumulated over centuries and millennia. But they only do all these things properly if they are in good condition – and, mostly, they are not.

So the drinking water they provide is coloured by peat soil getting into the water courses, because drainage and lack of vegetation makes the peat surface fragile. This adds millions of pounds to the water companies’ costs, to clean the water before it gets to our taps. Wildlife finds it hard to live in the too-dry soils and is disappearing – 45% of English upland bird species are declining, including curlews, red-listed and globally near-threatened, and around two-thirds of the upland species of butterflies, other invertebrates and flowering plants. And carbon is escaping from our uplands, instead of being captured – 350,000 tonnes of CO₂ each year.

Yet the situation isn’t as hopeless as it may sound. From Dartmoor and Exmoor, and right up through the Pennines, there are a handful of pioneering projects mending our upland peatlands, restoring the conditions that provide all the services and wildlife we should expect from these places. And whilst this costs money, more effective spending of existing public funding can go a long way to restoring a significant part of the 200,000 hectares we want back in good condition. We’ll need a bit more – something like the extra £15 million that the Scottish Government recently announced for peatland conservation. So we’ve written to the Defra minister asking for action, to get this done. And it’s a sizeable ‘we’ – the National Trust, the Wildlife Trusts, Buglife, the Campaign for National Parks, CPRE the Campaign to Protect Rural England, both the Dartmoor and Exmoor Mires Projects, the John Muir Trust, the North Pennines AONB Partnership, South West Water and United Utilities are all with us on this.

You can help us too. Write to your MP and tell them this is important to you, and that you’d like action from Defra to sort this. Make a noise, on social media, in the pub, and tell your friends and colleagues. Out of sight, out of mind, our fabulous English uplands are being wasted away. We can change that.