News

Peat uplands in the spotlight for environmental protection

(3 March 2006)

Scientists at Durham and other universities are teaming up to highlight the importance of peat moors in protecting the environment from an excessive build-up of carbon in the atmosphere.

Information gathered from studies in Teesdale, Weardale and Tynedale in the North Pennines is feeding into a new £0.6 million combination of research projects involving the universities of Durham, Leeds, Sheffield, and Sussex in the Peak District – the National Park that lies within an hour’s drive of one-third of the UK population. The Leeds-led collaboration aims to understand what rural policy changes mean for the future of rural livelihoods and the countryside.

At Durham Dr Fred Worrall, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences, and environmental geographer Prof Tim Burt, are developing models for the storage of carbon in upland peat. This is based on years of research in the North Pennine uplands and other parts of Britain.

Dr Worrall said: “Peat is much more vital in terms of carbon storage than forests. The UK peat stocks store more than the forests of France and Britain combined. How we look after the uplands is extremely important.” The management of the uplands for farming, hunting and tourism, and the impact of drainage, rotational burning and other activities all affect the capacity of peat to take in and store carbon from the atmosphere. Peat continues to grow and had an endless capacity to store carbon if treated properly, which in turn helps to slow down global warming.

Much of Britain's drinking water comes from uplands and they are home to threatened plant and animal species. Changes in farm subsidies and new EU rules on land management impact on water quality; additional public rights of way have been opened; and traditional management practices like heather burning are receiving increasing scrutiny. The potential impact of all this on rural communities is huge, especially in the Peak District.

Chris Dean, project manager of the Moors for the Future Partnership in the Peak District National Park said: “The collision of diverse interests in the uplands really comes to a head in the Peak District, where all the different drivers of upland change are at their most pronounced.” The Peak District studies are looking at how upland communities can respond to such changes. The research is funded by the government's Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme, a research initiative that brings together diverse teams of natural and social scientists with local stakeholders and policy makers. The goal is to identify a choice of options for the future of the countryside that could never have been developed by any of these groups in isolation.

The RELU projects in the Peak District have been launched in collaboration with the Moors for the Future partnership.