Is peatland restoration high enough on the government’s agenda?

RSPB Andrew Midgley, our Senior Land Use Policy Officer, asks whether the government is lowering its ambitions for peatland restoration.

This week hundreds of experts in peatland management are descending on Aviemore for the IUCN Peatland Conference. Several colleagues are attending and we are pleased to be able to host some site visits at Abernethy and Insh Marshes.  

RSPB Scotland is passionate about peatland restoration. We have been restoring peatlands that are now in our care for a long time, such as those at Abernethy and Forsinard Flows, and we were delighted recently when the Flow Country secured the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage Site status for its global importance.  

The reason we are so passionate about peatlands is because they have a vital role to play in helping tackle the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Peatlands form the largest extent of semi-natural habitat in the UK and are important for a wide range of species. Our peatland sites are home to species like Golden Plover, Dunlin, Greenshank and Hen Harrier, but also Red-throated and Black-throated Divers and Common Scoter. We are restoring peatlands, by, for example, removing inappropriately planted non-native trees. In this way we hope to bring them back into good condition where they support the full assemblage of peatland species, thereby turning around some of the negative biodiversity trends. 

Peatland restoration, though, is not just about biodiversity. Peatlands are also critically important in our efforts to tackle carbon emissions and address climate change. Healthy peatlands sequester and store large amounts of carbon. Unfortunately, damaged peatlands release that carbon and in Scotland about 80% of our peatlands are degraded in some way and releasing large amounts of carbon at precisely the time we are trying to reduce emissions.  

As one of the largest sources of carbon emissions in Scotland peatlands restoration has got to be high on the agenda, especially given that the government has said that tackling the climate emergency is one of its priorities.    

The Scottish Government has been sending the right signals. In 2020, it announced that it would spend £250 million over ten years to restore 20,000 hectares of Scottish peatland annually, towards a total of 250,000 hectares by 2030.  However, delivery on this commitment has been lacking. The government delivers peatland restoration through its delivery partners*, and in each year since 2020 the government has failed to achieve its annual ambitions**. 

Restoration rates are increasing, which is good and something to be celebrated, but they are still only scratching the surface. The government gave itself ten years to restore 250,000 ha of peatland, but in the first four years only managed around 29,000ha, meaning that we still need to see restoration over 210,000 ha in the next six years. That’s looking increasing unlikely without a substantial step change in delivery. Continually under achieving just makes meeting the target more and more difficult.  

To be fair, it clearly takes time to get a programme of restoration up and running and much of the focus in recent years has been in establishing the systems needed to deliver more restoration in future. The spend on peatland restoration has also been increasing; the challenge appears to be more in the realms of capacity and the timescales needed to develop projects. 

But the recent Programme for Government refers to how the government aspires to ‘restore at least 10,000 hectares of degraded peatland’ in the coming year. Is the government lowering its ambition? Is it de-prioritising peatland restoration? Is less funding going to be available, leading to the lower ambition?  

We are clearly in difficult financial times and the government faces difficult choices, but the government itself refers to how “[t]he twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss represent the existential threat of our times”. Think about that … “The existential threat of our times”. Yet we seem to be going backwards on an agenda that could play a hugely positive role in reducing emissions and reversing biodiversity loss. This is all the more perplexing given that restoring peatland is relatively easy and cost-effective (in comparison to big infrastructure projects or retrofitting all homes with new heating systems that we also need to do) and that delaying action will simply lead to higher costs in future.   

Hopefully this conference in Aviemore this week will send a clear message to the government that we need more than positive rhetoric, we need a real drive and meaningful action to deliver much enhanced peatland restoration across Scotland.  

* The Peatland Action delivery partners are NatureScot (which delivers the main funding directed at private landowners), Cairngorms National Park Authority, Loch Lomond & the Trossachs National Park Authority, Forestry and Land Scotland and Scottish Water. 

** The data in the table has been taken from a response to a request for environmental information and a Scottish Government press release: 1) Funding package for peatland restoration: EIR release - gov.scot (www.gov.scot); 2) Record high peatland restoration - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).