New deal for peatbogs? Limited victory so battle continues…

A deal was announced today (27th Feb­ru­ary 2002) between Scotts and Eng­lish Nature, to restore major peat­bogs as eco­log­i­cal sites.

The deal is undoubt­ed­ly very good news, but it is cer­tain­ly not the end of the sto­ry. The main pointsof the deal are giv­en below.

* Thorne Moor, South York­shire, and Wed­holme Flow, Cum­bria to be restored to raised bog habi­tats. This will be start­ed imme­di­ate­ly; no more peat will be extract­ed from the site.
* Hat­field Moor, South York­shire, to be con­tin­ued to be mined for peat for a fur­ther two years, although only on half the site — the oth­er half will also now be restored.
* For this, Eng­lish Nature will pay Scotts £17 mil­lion as com­pen­sa­tion. Scotts will take on much of the respon­si­bil­i­ty for car­ry­ing out the restora­tion.

Clear­ly this is very wel­come, but the fight is far from over. Some of the prob­lems that remain are:

* Car­ry­ing on extract­ing peat for anoth­er two years could make a cru­cial dif­fer­ence to the chances of a raised bog habi­tat re-evolv­ing on Hat­field Moor. The depth of the peat is get­ting star­tling­ly low on many parts of the site, and below a cer­tain depth the eco­log­i­cal val­ue of the sys­tem that will regen­er­ate will be sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced.
* In many places the bot­tom of the peat has been breached, and the sand lay­er has been dug into. This intro­duces exces­sive nutri­ents into the water table, which means the peat may not sup­port many impor­tant plants. Con­tin­ued dig­ging will almost cer­tain­ly exac­er­bate this.
* Scotts bear much of the respon­si­bil­i­ty for car­ry­ing out the eco­log­i­cal restora­tion work. How­ev­er, giv­en their track record of destroy­ing eco­log­i­cal sys­tems, what are the assur­ances that they will not put prof­itabil­i­ty before doing a good job?
* Scotts will con­tin­ue to oper­ate their oth­er peat­land sites in the UK. In par­tic­u­lar, Carn­wath Moss in Scot­land is a des­ig­nat­ed SSSI, and they have said that they will con­tin­ue extrac­tion there for the fore­see­able future.
* There are many oth­er peat com­pa­nies who also still mine peat from valu­able wildlife sites. In par­tic­u­lar Wm. Sin­clair Ltd, who make J. Arthur Bow­ers brand com­post, con­tin­ue to mine at Bolton Fell in Cum­bria, and have pledged to legal­ly chal­lenge gov­ern­ment plans to des­ig­nate it a Spe­cial Area for Con­ser­va­tion (this sta­tus would mean they would have to stop extract­ing peat). They also mine at Whim bog, an SSSI in Scot­land.
* With the clo­sure of UK peat mines, the prob­lem may well just be shift­ed over­seas. Import­ed peat will form a grater pro­por­tion of the mar­ket, with new bogs being destroyed in Ire­land or the Baltic States.

So let’s be encour­aged by the lat­est news, but not stop until the peat indus­try is no more!