A blog on bogs

In my role as Chairman of the 2020 group I attended a dinner on peat. Not normally the subject of meal time conversation, I know, but a vital and largely unknown topic. Peatlands are one of the world’s greatest natural stores of carbon but in the past man’s activities have generally caused this landscape to degrade substantially. The UK, and Scotland in particular, has a lot of peatland with an estimated three million hectares or about 12% of the total land mass. That stores around three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and could be absorbing another 3 million tonnes each year. However, all the sins of the past mean that the peatland is actually releasing about 10 million tonnes each year rather than storing more. That’s a 13 million swing which is about 30% of Scotland’s annual emissions.

The experts reckon it would cost between £250 and £400 per hectare to restore the peat bogs to their former glory and maintenance and monitoring would be about £4 to £5 each year. The carbon saving is around 4 tonnes per hectare per year. I reckon that gives a pretty low cost of reducing carbon. My maths suggest that over, say, a twenty year period the saving would be 80 tonnes at a total cost of up to £500 which is only just over £6 per tonne.

However, there are problems and that is what the dinner was about. How do you create a market for this service so that people who want to pay to reduce carbon emissions can invest in peatland restoration as an alternative to other forms of sequestration such as forestry or as an alternative to high cost zero carbon energy? What value would businesses place on the carbon saved? Over what time frame should investments be measured; I used twenty years in my simple example but for many businesses that is an eternity. So what is the right period? How do you ensure that the work is done properly and that claims of emission reductions are more than just greenwash? How do you resolve the competing land use claims? And all that before we got to dessert!

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is drawing up a peatland code and the RSPB has some great case studies involving the Flow Country (the common name for the peat bogs of Caithness and Sutherland) but the real prize is to get businesses involved to test out the processes and bring market principles to bear. The challenge is, I believe, to turn Scotland’s peat bogs from emitters to absorbers by 2020. It can be done but will need the collaboration of Government, business and civil society.