Restore Peatlands

ISABELLE Hello and welcome to the Carbon Copy Podcast with me Isabelle Sparrow  

BRADLEY: and me Bradley Ingham. 

ISABELLE We’re back with the second episode of this series, Do Something Bigger, in which we’re looking at ways to have more impact by taking collaborative action in the place where you live. Over the course of 2025 we’re covering 25 different actions which can make a difference to climate change and to nature, so if you’ve started with a theme that doesn’t really inspire you, do come back for the next episode – which might be more your thing! 

Carbon Copy is a charity inspiring more big-thinking local action for climate and nature. This podcast series is part of our year-long campaign: 25 Big Local Actions in 2025, do check out the show notes for more information, and subscribe now to hear the next episodes as soon as they land. 

BRADLEY: Today’s episode, is Restore Peatlands. 

ISABELLE: I think we both were quite surprised by this one weren’t we? 

BRADLEY: Yes I had no idea how important peat was until we recorded this episode, and to be honest, I had no idea how interesting I’d find it! 

ISABELLE: Well, the two guests we spoke to for this episode both feel very passionate about peat, so rather than us explaining what all the fuss is about – we’ll go straight to our first. Simon Gray is Head of Peatland Recovery at Ulster Wildlife. I asked him why peat restoration was so important – and why it was becoming an increasing focus for organisations across the UK. 

SIMON: The cynic in me would say that the likes of ourselves, Ulster Wildlife, and lots of other NGOs, like conservation organisations, have been working on peatlands for a long time. We’ve had nature reserves like Ballynahone Bog here since the early 2000s. The reason that we have been involved in peatlands is because of the biodiversity interest. There are lots of endemic and rare species that are very specifically adapted to living on bogs, like insectivorous plants such as sundews, or particular bird species like curlews and hen harriers. 

The reason why peatlands have started to get a lot more limelight is because of their importance when it comes to carbon, particularly, but also in providing other ecosystem services like flood mitigation, improving water quality, and all sorts of things. The key reason that they’ve started to get the limelight is because they only provide these kinds of ecosystem services, like sequestering carbon or water purification, whenever they’re in a good state. If you have healthy, happy bogs, then you get all those benefits for our society. But if they are in a degraded state, not only do they not provide those benefits, they actually negatively impact them. 

So you get worse water quality, you get worse flooding, you lose lots of CO2 to the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change and all the species that we are looking to try and conserve and protect, they start to disappear. So they are a landscape and a habitat which if they’re in the right sort of state, they’re really working for everybody. But if they’re not, then they’re actively kind of working against us.  

Bradley: Wow, that all sounds a bit worrying. I suppose this might be a good moment to explain what exactly the peatlands are. You might have heard them being referred to as bogs, but peatlands are unique wetland ecosystems with layers of partially decayed organic matter called peat accumulate over thousands of years. These waterlogged, acidic and nutrient poor environments support specialised plants like sphagnum mosses. Now, while they might not look remarkable at first glance, peatlands play a crucial role in the Earth’s carbon cycle, storing vast amounts of carbon and helping to regulate water quality and flow. Simon gave us more insight into the scale of the issue and the critical role peatlands play in holding carbon. 

SIMON: So peatlands they only cover about 3% of the world surface, but they hold more carbon than all of the forests on the planet combined. And in a UK, in an Irish context, we have a huge proportion of peatlands as our land mass. In Ireland, we have the fourth highest percentage cover of peatland, in terms of the cover of the Island of Ireland, in the world. We’re only beaten by Canada, Finland and Indonesia. And it stores massive amounts of carbon. 

ISABELLE: So that’s pretty important then. We spoke to Alex Hubberstey from Lancashire Peat Partnership about how their work is supported, and how, despite the clear case for focusing on peatlands, they are still not given an equal proportion of funds. 

ALEX: So there is the Great North Bog, which is a partnership of peat partnerships. We are a collective, we come together, we share ideas. And they managed to secure some funding from a charitable foundation, which was then disseminate to the different peat partnerships, of which there are six of us. Lancashire got a portion of that which allowed for myself and my colleagues come in. So then that was the specific focus in November 2022. But at that same time there’s been a focus from government in the nature for climate fund. This is a fund that covers both woodlands and peatlands. I believe the figure was it’s a £600 million pot. The organisation bid into 50 million of that was designated to peatland and the 550 was designated to woodlands. And the interesting thing here is peatlands store twice as much carbon as woodland does. They are twice as good at storing carbon as a rainforest. And you also have to think of a forest as a temporary carbon store. Now I say temporary in inverted commas, because it’s obviously an oak tree. It might last a thousand years, but peatlands can last 10,000 years and that carbon is never given off. A tree has a as a finite lifetime, and when it dies that carbon is released again in the short term or short term in terms of trees, they are really good. They’re important habitats. We need woodlands, but if we want to sequester more carbon and in this race to net zero, peatlands are our most important habitat.  

Bradley: That’s so frustrating isn’t it!? I feel like we need to raise awareness on this, I don’t think enough people know how important these landscapes are! 

ISABELLE Yeah absolutely. I wonder if there’s something around the history of peatlands, maybe a bit of an image problem for what peat is, and what bogs are? 

Bradley: Yeah I definitely think there’s something around that, and in fact Simon mentioned this when we spoke to him: 

SIMON: So historically here, I can’t speak for GB, but in Ireland we would have seen bogs as waste ground. It would have been areas that you couldn’t do anything else with. You couldn’t. It was, you know, it was very wet. You can farm it, you couldn’t even grow trees on it potentially. And a lot of that ended up making them being used for nefarious stuff, whether it was landfill or illegal dumping or whatever it was. And generally they have just been seen as ground that you can do nothing with and that’s been the case for a very long time, for centuries. I want us to be in a situation by 2050, 2060, whereby we don’t see bogs as waste ground anymore. We don’t see them as these areas that are providing nothing to either individuals or society, but rather they are these healthy, happy habitats that are providing this amazing suite of benefits to society. So they’re supporting some of the most and enigmatic species that we have. Curlew is a really, really enigmatic and kind of vocal and very obvious species, which is associated with bogs in Ireland. It is almost gone as a breeding bird species here now, it’s at risk of becoming extinct. I want to see a situation whereby we have healthy, happy bogs that are supporting things like curlew and cuckoo and large heath butterfly and marsh fritillary and all those sorts of things. But they are also then improving water quality, improving, reducing flooding, sequestering carbon. But okay, they’re doing all that. But I want to be in a situation where everybody knows that they do that and they want to see them do that. They value them for providing those things rather than at the minute. You know, I’m still wouldn’t say as much as I’m banging on my head against a brick wall or I’m still having to convince people that, you know, they do these things. 

I want to get to a point whereby whenever I say to somebody about the benefits that peatlands provide, that I don’t need to actually, they already know. So that’s where I would like to end up.  

ISABELLE That’s such a beautiful vision. What do you think, can we get there? 

Bradley: Yeah, I mean, even just making this episode and learning about it has really made me want to get involved. We did speak to Both Simon and Alex about what actions people can take to help to restore peatlands. First, here’s Simon: 

SIMON: I mean, the key things that I always try and get across to people is are two very straightforward, relatively easy things that you can do. One, there is lots of organisations like Ulster Wildlife, whether it’s the other Wildlife Trusts across GB or the RSPB or the National Trust or Butterfly Conservation, whoever it is. We have lots of opportunities for volunteering so you can get involved with lots of those local NGOs in order to do things like control invasive species. That’s something I haven’t touched on yet. That’s a big pressure on a load of peatland habitats. We have a huge problem of rhododendron in this part of the world and I know they do in Scotland as well, but also things like mapping and surveying areas. 

I know that the likes of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, they enlist loads of volunteers to help with, you know, carrying out peat depth surveys or monitoring water table and project sites and that added kind of boots on the ground really helps organisations like ourselves kind of spread ourselves more greatly and kind of achieve a lot more. So that’s one area that I would say if can if you have the ability and you’re interested, definitely reach out to some of these organisations locally to see what volunteering opportunities they have.  

The other thing, which is very easy for people to do and this is targeted specifically at the gardeners is peat free compost. So it seems like sometimes whenever I talk about this, I feel like not only a broken record, but like, come on, like going there. There’s surely more you can do than that. And there is so peat is a pretty intricate part of the standard compost development and industrial compost production process. And unfortunately, Northern Ireland and Scotland are huge producers, so there is a massive market for production of compost and peat has been used for donkey’s years, largely because of its water retention ability. So compost that have a lot of peat and they tend not to dry out as quickly, which is why it’s been used for a very long time. 

But whatever you see, the results of harvesting peat from anywhere that it is done, it is devastating. You know, at Haughey’s Bog, as I said earlier on, what they do is they completely strip the top layer of vegetation off any kind of peatland area. And they just they use massive machines to do what’s called milling, where they kind of break the peat up into this really fine material and then it’s dried out. And although they did drain these huge areas anyway to dry it out and then they dried out even further, it’s get piled to these massive, big industrial scale kind of piles and then it gets shipped off to wherever it’s it can be incorporated into the compost mixed with other materials. So it is hugely devastating. And those areas where peat is milled for compost, that is, you know, the greatest level of carbon emissions come from those areas. The biggest impacts on water quality will come from those areas. I mean, even if you think about the productive like rainfall landing on that area, there’s literally nothing in order to slow down the flow or to soak it up or anything. So it is it’s really devastating. But if you buy peat-free compost, then you are not contributing to that industry and that further degradation. And now it used to be years ago that it was really hard to find peat-free compost. These days there is no excuse. So most of the major supermarkets will sell peat-free compost. A lot of the big kind of garden centres the B&Qs and the Homebases and those sorts of things, they will have lots of peat-free compost alternatives and even a lot of people used to say it was more expensive. That’s not really true anymore either. A lot of the alternatives are exactly the same price, so that’s a really easy win. Nobody should be buying peat-based compost anymore at all.  

ISABELLE Alex said some really similar things, both about volunteering and about using peat-free compost. So those are clearly sort of the top things that you can do. But there are a couple of other things Alex mentioned which were really interesting as well. 

ALEX: The other two big ones, I think is you can write to your MP. I know he said that classic thing “write to your MP” and talk about more emphasis on peatland restoration. We want to protect our peatlands. We are at risk now of windfarm developments. No, I’m not against wind energy. I think it’s absolutely something we need to do, but it being built on a peatland will actually have a negative effect because of in the construction process. They have to dry out the habitat. They have to basically destroy the habitat and the carbon that will be given off from that site is very likely, and I can’t say that I’ve seen any science to back this up. It is effectively common sense in the field, but although that wind farm might provide green energy to 10,000 homes, which is good, and I think we need them. It’s going to give off much more carbon in the construction by damaging the peatland habitat. It’s better to put the wind turbines somewhere else and restore the peatland. And that two-pronged approach will help us reach net zero much quicker. And the other one for people who go out walking on a peatland is just follow the countryside code. That is a big one. And a lot of people since the COVID lockdowns, a lot more people obviously couldn’t go abroad. So we’re utilising the greenspace that were available to them, which is absolutely great for the mental health and wellbeing aspects is brilliant, but use it correctly. That means closing gates behind you, keeping your dogs on a lead. And like I said, the ground nesting birds are there in the summer. They are very sensitive and if people have dogs off leads, the dogs could kill the birds, disrupt the nests, kill the chicks. Even the best trained dog, and you’ll see signs that say, “Please keep your dog under control”. I would go one step further, keep them on a lead, because with the best intention in the world, your dog might not have 100% recall. And if it doesn’t have 100% recall, it needs to stay on the lead. There are places you can go. We can run your dog off a lead. A peatland during the summer. Shouldn’t be one of them. Don’t like barbecues, don’t cut fences, don’t light fires. Leave no trace. All these things that were I remember being taught from when I was a kid growing up through primary school, the countryside code. And it sure seems to be that people aren’t being taught it or that they’re just forgetting it. And it’s if we don’t respect these habitats, these habitats will disappear. And that’s a such a tragedy if that happens.  

BRADLEY: It’s so interesting hearing from two organisations doing similar things, but working across really different landscapes, both literally and in terms of how the land is managed. We spoke to Simon about some of the challenges of land ownership in Northern Ireland, specifically.  

SIMON: The one interesting thing about doing in Ireland when it comes to this sort of thing, when it comes to conservation work on land management in general, which we are really contrasted to particularly areas of England and Scotland where the vast majority of the big peatland restoration projects have gone on so far. We look at Scotland and the North of England, they’re years ahead. But the land ownership system in those parts of England and Scotland is very, very different to here. So we do not have large estates with the exception of maybe one or two in a very few localised areas. And all of our land is is private, well, most of our land is privately owned by lots of smaller landholders and farmers. 

So the average farm size in Northern Ireland is 40 hectares. Whereas in Scotland, for example, it could be as much as ten times that much. But a special area conservation area out in County Tyrone, just south of Omagh called Cranny Bogs, and it’s a very stereotypical lowland raised bog complex in between drumlins and that part of the world. And it’s 76 hectares in size, so not gigantic, 76 hectares, but with 17 landowners. So you compare that to situations whereby, you know, in Scotland you may well work with one landowner and you could do peatland restoration or any kind of, you know, habitat management work over thousands of hectares and only ever work with or need the consent of one person. 

Whereas here we wanted to do and we did achieve it in the end. We wanted to do drain blocking and peatland restoration on this one site and we needed to get the permission of 17 land owners just to work on 76 hectares. And right now that’s actually our biggest challenge is trying to work out what the incentivisation system is, in order to get people to engage. 

ISABELLE It’s a lot of effort, it sounds like, but the way both Simon and Alex talk about peat, I can see why it’s necessary – it’s just so important that these landscapes are restored and protected.  

BRADLEY: Yeah, I think their passion about it is definitely, it’s infectious isn’t it?! 

ISABELLE: So, we’ve learnt a lot. Let’s sum it up. We’ve learned that peatlands are crucial for a whole lot of reasons – they are amazing habitats for some rare and beautiful species, like the curlew, hen harrier and insectivorous plants like sundews. 

BRADLEY: That’s correct AND they are pretty much the best kind of landscape for holding carbon – and carbon that’s tied up in peatlands is there pretty much forever. 

ISABELLE: Yes and we also learned how disastrous it is when the peat is stripped – huge amounts of carbon is released, not to mention the impacts on the wildlife and on flood risks and water quality. 

BRADLEY: And finally we learned that there are lots of things people can do to take action for peat – but probably the easiest and the one we should all be doing is to avoid peat compost. 

ISABELLE: Yes! There’s no excuse! None! 

BRADLEY: And that one applies both to individual gardeners and to collaborative projects too. On Carbon Copy there are hundreds of stories from community groups and organisations focused on food growing and sustainable gardening, and there are thousands more across the country. Imagine if every single one of these projects said no to peat! 

ISABELLE: Yeah that would be brilliant wouldn’t it? If you’d like to learn more about the organisations mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes for links, and if you’d like to know more about this action or any of the others in our 25 Big Local Actions campaign, visit carboncopy.eco/takeaction. 

BRADLEY: Thanks very much for listening to this episode of Do Something Bigger from the Carbon Copy Podcast. Our next episode, Take Flood Action, is out in a couple of weeks, and will be hosted by Izzy and special guest host Joanna Yarrow. 

ISABELLE Very exciting! This episode was written and presented by me Isabelle Sparrow 

BRADLEY: and me Bradley Ingham. 

ISABELLE: Brad also produced and edited the episode. Huge thanks to our guests, Simon Gray from Ulster Wildlife and Alex Hubberstey from Lancashire Peat Partnership. Until next time, goodbye!