Jim Densham, RSPB Scotland
Would you call £1.7m a trickle of money? Probably not. Think what you might do with all that dosh. The Scottish Government has just announced this amount of new funding for peatland restoration from its Green Stimulus Package. Good news, and we said so.
But £1.7m over 2 years is a trickle compared to £12m a year needed over 10 years to restore 600,000 hectares of peat bog habitat. That’s 2,316 square miles, and it’s the area of blanket bog that Government is obliged to restore for the benefit of biodiversity. We also want degraded peatlands restored to halt the loss of carbon to the atmosphere from the damaged peat soils and to contribute to achieving our climate change targets. Scotland actually has 1.5million hectares (5,791 square miles) of blanket bog habitat, plus lots more with peaty soil, so there is great potential for Scotland’s land to be a positive influence on the climate.
Not all the £12m per year has to come from a central pot of money from Government. Earlier this month RSPB Scotland and our partners in the Peatlands Partnership passed the first round towards receiving over £4million from the Heritage Lottery Fund for the ‘Flows to the Future’ project. We aim to restore part of Europe’s largest intact expanse of blanket bog in the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland and to make the area a centre of learning for this type of activity.
The Flow Country, at Forsinard Andy Hay RSPB
All this new money will boost the existing funds, such as from the Scottish Rural Development Programme, that we and others already invest in ditch blocking and removal of inappropriately planted trees on blanket bog. We also use our own money to restore damaged peatlands back to a healthy state, for example at our Forsinard Flows nature reserve in the far north of Scotland.
Investment in peatland restoration can come from a number of sources, yet the important thing is that the commitment from Government is there to find the £12m per year - and that action happens on the ground in the right places. If commitment is there, a trickle can become a flood.
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