Peatlands and Rural Economies
Over 100 people attended the 8th IUCN UK Peatland Programmes’ Nationwide Conference on the topic of ‘Peatland Connections: Building Prosperity’ between the 2nd and 4th of October 2018 in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park of Scotland.
The overarching aim of the programme has been to promote the restoration of peatlands in the UK, while advocating for the multiple benefits they provide via partnerships, strong science, sound policy and effective practice. The conference this year has focussed on the public benefits of peatlands, investigating and presenting how peatlands, which constitute almost 20% of land cover in Scotland (and of which, approximately 50% are damaged), can support prosperous businesses and communities when functioning well. The conference presented peatlands and the work being done to restore them in the UK through the framing of natural capital — which is increasingly used in the context of discussing environmental management in the UK.
Jonathan Hughes of the Peatland Programme drew immediate attention to the fact that investing in peatlands in Scotland at an adequate scale requires large injections of capital now in order to save money in the long-run by returning current and prospective natural capital liabilities into assets. Looking to the Loch Lomond & Trossachs National Park as an example, he highlighted the fact that 10 times more carbon is stored in its peat than forests, with peat conservation and restoration activities therefore providing substantial economic benefits through helping with the prevention of, and adaptation to, climate change.
Francesca Osowska, the CEO of Scottish Natural Heritage — the statutory environmental management agency in Scotland — went on to introduce the Scottish National Peatland Plan and ‘peatland action’ initiative, which are helping realize the Scottish government’s aim as outlined in its Climate Change Plan of 2018 — for restoring 50,000 hectares of peatland by 2020, and 250,000 by 2030. To this end and since 2012, 15,000 hectares of peatland have been ‘set on their road to restoration’. More can be found on this initiative at www.nature.scot/peatlandaction.
Dieter Helm, professor of energy economics at the University of Oxford, contributed to the discussion by expanding on the concept of Natural Capital (NC). For Helm, NC is defined as what nature provides us for free, a planetary inheritance to which every generation should have a right. Rather than focussing on ecosystem services terminology which is often associated with the NC concept, Helm asks for the NC concept to be understood as relating to assets and opportunities in natural systems. Natural capital can be subdivided into that which is non-renewable e.g. metals, and that which is renewable, e.g. forests. Renewable NC can act as an asset in perpetuity, or until climatic and biophysical factors renders it otherwise and suffice rates of consumption do not exceed those of renewal. This perspective of nature as quantifiable assets within accounting frameworks grounded in quantified analysis (biophysical and economic) give a numerical basis for gauging progress in effectively investing in NC assets.
Regarding how the economic benefits of peatlands are quantified, Hazel Trenbirth representing the Office for National Statistics highlighted that Gross Domestic Product as a metric for assessing the health of the UK’s economy gives only a partial picture of societal development given that it focusses only on flows and not stocks. The ONS have systematically expanded their remit to account for the value of the UK’s natural capital assets measured in both physical and monetary terms. In line with SEEA-Experimental Ecosystem Accounts guidance, the approach used for valuing these natural capital assets proceeds by splitting the UK into its constituent ecosystems, measuring the spatial extent of those ecosystems through GIS-based mapping and categorising these according to their condition. The ecosystem services thought to be derived from a given ecosystem type are then established and measured, before a monetary value is assigned to services based on demand-factors.
Andrew Moxley went to explain that peatland restoration provides benefits to society which are largely untraded in markets directly such as temperature regulation, and cultural values, but which nevertheless provide societal value, including via production functions for other goods and services. Looking at the economic value of carbon sequestration services provided by restoring peatlands as one element of their total economic value, these were estimated to range between £90-210/ha/yr (up to £1350/ha), while when accounting for the ‘total’ benefits of restoring peatland, these were thought to be £127-414/ha/yr in Scotland and £152-411/ha/yr for the whole of the UK.
Costs of peatland restoration vary according to factors including types of restoration undertaken and location of activities. These costs can be categorized into: upfront administrative costs for design; upfront capital costs for restoration undertakings such as grip blocking (ranging from £150-7000/ha across projects assessed); recurrent costs such as for repairs; and opportunity costs such as associated with losses in income from the next most valuable use of land. Accounting for both cost and benefits through benefit-cost analysis can help determine where the greatest return on investment with scarce financial resources might be had when investing in ecosystems.
Methods for Peatland Restoration
The second day of the conference allowed participants to tour peatland restoration sites in proximity to the Loch Lomond and Trossachs national park, including those carried out by the park itself, by charities such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and private landowners. In the national park itself, ‘nature, heritage and land are managed and enhanced to provide multiple benefits for all’ and efforts are underway with Scottish Natural Heritage to invest funds from the Scottish Government’s Peatland Action programme in restoring degraded peatlands. In addition to restoring natural capital through the likes of woodland expansion and enhancement, peatland restoration, reducing marine litter and non-native species, the natural park’s management seeks to tackle climate change through natural flood management, connecting habitats and enhancing carbon sequestration, and establishing land partnerships to manage grazing intensity.
One definition of ecological restoration is the intentional activity of initiating or accelerating the return of a degraded, damaged or transformed ecosystem resulting directly or indirectly from human activities, to a historical trajectory with respect to structure, composition and/or function.
By Medieval times in Scotland, a substantial proportion of the nation’s forests had been cut down for fuel and construction. Following mass deforestation, peat - rich in carbon as it is - was cut, dried and burned for fuel. Long-term grazing by cattle and sheep, in addition to the recent proliferation of large herbivores such as deer due to natural predators having been killed, has led to a form of negative artificial selection in vegetative communities, hindering the growth of shrubs and trees, and leading to erosion through trampling.
Peatland draining, or ‘gripping’ to improve the value of land for agriculture as encouraged by the 1947 Agricultural Act, has led to declining edaphic moisture, lowered water-table and changes in vegetative communities. These effects have caused the ecological structures and functions of peatlands (such as invertebrate habitat provision by small surface pools) to decline and impact other services such as carbon sequestration, water purification and hydrological attenuation. Park employees, supported partly by funding from the EU Life initiative, have been undertaking restoration-related interventions, including culling red deer, reducing grazing density and blocking grips to increase local water tables.
To block grips, dams are created using locally available materials, primarily peat. Peat is extracted for these purposes by digging a ditch on contour (to prevent causing erosion), removing turf, extracting peat and then replacing the turf afterwards. The most aerated peat on both sides of a historically constructed gulley is dug through to reach non-oxygenated peat to ensure a dam adequately seals. Dams are then constructed along the length of gullies either by hand or using machinery in order to slow the flow of water through them, while increasing sediment deposit and water-logging.
In a relatively short period of several years, the material trapped behind dams act as raised, moist islands within ditches, raising water levels while providing habitat for the likes of Sphagnum mosses and other species that colonize created pools. Increased wetting enhances other ecosystem services such as the sequestration of carbon by peat, support of native vegetation communities and reduced likelihood of fire incidence. Sphagnum inoculation is sometimes opted for, but autogenic revegetation is typically relied on. To sustain the services generated by this kind of restoration, maintenance over time is required to counteract sometimes high rates of dam failure.
Expanding Peatland Restoration
Turning to the type of policy framework which can assist in improving peatland health in Scotland, Tom Lancaster of the RSPB highlighted that government subsidies and policy often stand behind those ‘proximate’ factors which have caused degradation to peatlands such as conifer planting, industrial pollution, grazing and gripping. Therefore, it is proposed that current regulation needs to take a step-change to counteract historical ‘regulatory failure’ and cut through ‘contradictory drivers of land-use change’ while enhancing payments for public goods, providing advice, and improving monitoring, enforcement and evaluation.
Jo Pike of the Scottish Wildlife Trust highlighted the increasingly complex nature of public goods through the example of the internet, which though being a public good in its nature, is upheld by private companies. In doing so, she questioned the tradition split between public and private actors in producing such goods and services, with this extending to the need for policy makers to collaborate with the private sector in achieving environmental goals. Jo highlighted that different levels of natural capital management — be it maintenance, enhancement or restoration — requires multiple levels of coordination and financing methods between public and private actors.
Thomas Binns, representing the National Farmers Trust, provided insight into the perspectives of agriculturalists, who manage the majority of Scotland and the UK’s land cover, and are therefore a key private stakeholder in managing these assets. He highlighted that farmers are already actively aware of the importance of non-food benefits from their lands and in many cases are already providing these. Though agriculture primarily seeks to produce food, the intensification of which has resulted from farming subsidies following WW2, he argues that the changing focus of agricultural subsidies in the last 20-30 has led to improved environmental outcomes, and that farmers would respond positively to further subsidies which supported the production of non-provisioning ecosystems services from land.
Routes of project financing for peatland restoration include agri-environmental schemes, peatland-specific programmes such as Scottish Peatland Action, water company catchment management programmes and private funding such as green bonds.
Anja Liski expanded on the potential for catchment-level financing by analyzing the opportunity for private sector investment in natural capital in the Spey Catchment in Scotland. By surveying businesses within the catchment, she found a key issue limiting private-sector natural capitalinvestment is that many businesses don’t understand how such investment would benefit them, nor how to invest in doing so. As a means of surmounting the latter problem, two models for coordinating investment were proposed. Firstly, a ‘Levy Model’, wherein a levy is made on businesses requiring/requesting them to contribute to ecological investments which contribute to agreed priorities. This money could be funneled to an intermediary such as a landscape cooperative or partnership to determine how financial resources were allocated (though there remains ongoing issues with funding the administrative costs of such initiatives).
The second model would be more ‘project-based’, and involve payments being taken from businesses to pay for specific projects, with costs distributed according to who would benefit most. Businesses in this context saw government as having an important role in creating an investment framework, but that decision-making regarding resource allocations should ideally be decentralized. Anja concluded by highlighting there was much work to be done in this space given that privately financed restoration remained at a far smaller scale than that funded by public bodies.
Looking to publicly-led financing of restoration work, In order to finance the restoration of renewable natural capitak which has been degraded in the past, and maintain it where necessary, Helm recommended several routes. Firstly, a polluter-pays principle, wherein those who will damage, and to some extent, have damaged peatlands, pay for the costs of those damages. This might be done through establishing a fund supplied by a tax on environmentally damaging activities. Secondly, where there are beneficiaries of renewable NC assets, capturing some of those benefits monetarily, and supplying these to the owner/manager of peatland bogs is a further route. This has been further supported by the likes of the Green Alliance in their proposed Natural Infrastructure Schemes. Lastly, the reorientation of subsidies in line with the principle of ‘public money for public goods’ is a way through which natural capital assets might be invested in.