Projects to boost biodiversity and reduce carbon emissions across places including the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales and Dartmoor are being cancelled as the Government cuts funding for peatland restoration.
The UK’s peatlands hold more carbon that all the forests of England, Germany and France combined, but the majority of this land is in poor condition due to farming and peat extraction.
Over the last decade, the Government has spent over £60m restoring England’s degraded peatlands, however, the main source of funding, the Nature for Climate Fund, is coming to an end in March next year.
Conservation charities across the country are warning they will have to wind down projects and lay off staff due to a funding “cliff edge”.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has announced new funding for lowland peatland projects, which are mostly located in the South, but no equivalent for upland areas.
This means the cuts are mostly affecting the North of England, as well as parts of the South West, including Dartmoor and Exmoor.
Conservation groups argue the funding cuts will leave cities including York, Carlisle and Leeds more vulnerable to flooding, as peatlands also operate as natural flood defences.
The North and South West misses out on funding
The Nature for Climate Fund was launched by the Conservative government in 2020 to pay for initiatives that could boost biodiversity and reduce carbon emissions, such as tree planting and peatland restoration.
Around 12 per cent of the UK’s land area is peatlands, a type of wetland that provides over a quarter of the country’s drinking water and stores over three billion tonnes of carbon.
However, over 80 per cent of the UK’s peatland has been damaged by human activities such as draining the land for farming and peat extraction for gardening.
The Nature for Climate Fund launched wide-scale restoration projects across large swathes of England, but projects say they are now facing a “crisis” due to the funding cuts.
This includes the Great North Bog, an initiative that is restoring peatland across Northumberland, the Lake District, the North Pennines, the Yorkshire Dales and the Forest of Bowland.
Timber sediment traps and revegetation are used to restore peatlands in Langstrothdale (Photo: Jenny Sharman)The partnership has started restoration work across 170,000 hectares of upland peatland, an area more than double the size of Greater London.
However, the project’s chair Rachael Bice, who is CEO of Yorkshire Wildlife Trusts, said work is already winding down due to the funding “cliff edge”.
Around 90 jobs are at risk plus many more within contractors if additional funding does not materialise, she warned.
The South West Peatland Partnership, which is restoring peatlands across Exmoor, Dartmoor and parts of Cornwall, is also facing a similar “crisis”, according to the project’s manager, Morag Angus.
While the project also gets funding from South West Water and private sources, she said there was “not enough funding that would enable the scale of peatland restoration to continue”.
Angus said the initiative has driven “remarkable” changes in biodiversity, alongside making the region more resilient to drought and wildfires.
“All that just basically stops… by giving out these grants [Defra] put a lot of money into this work happening so it’s almost them not being interested in the investment of their assets,” she said.
Projects that could miss out on funding
A before and after picture of peatland restoration in Langstrothdale (Photo: Jenny Sharman)Peatland restoration work is a multi-year process that involves rewetting the land by blocking drains, building embankments and planting vegetation that absorbs water.
The Great North Bog project said work is at risk in the following areas:
Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, through which the River Ure flows. Restoring peatland here should help protect York from flooding. Mallerstang Valley in Cumbria within the catchment of the River Eden, which drives flooding in Carlisle. Wharfedale, North Yorkshire, which could help reduce flooding in Ilkley, Otley, Wetherby, Boston Spa, Tadcaster and Selby.In the South West, projects have been planned across Dartmoor that won’t go ahead, including at Black Ridge and Cranmere Pool.
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