Guest post: Peat bogs are carbon sinks
Originally a comment by Enzyme on One’s estates.
Campaigners have said much of this land lies on peat bogs, which should be allowed to grow wild to sequester carbon instead of being used for grouse shooting.
OK, but this is important, and it perhaps does undermine some of the point about tree-cover. I’ve no love for grouse-moors, and many grouse moors are close to peat areas: anyone who’s been to the Peak District can attest that there’ll be grouse-butts in one place, and a couple of hundred metres away you’re up to your thighs in peat.
BUT… Peat-bogs are not forest. They are AMAZING carbon sinks. According to the Beeb,
Peatlands cover around 12% of the land in the UK and store an estimated 3 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to all the forests in the UK, Germany and France put together.
Granted this, complaining that they have lower-than-average tree cover is to miss the mark. In fact, if they had more tree cover, they’d be worse for the environment: much worse, in fact.
Bluntly, in huge parts of the UK, what you want is scrubby upland moors, some of which will be waterlogged, but some of which won’t – and the not-waterlogged bit is ideal for grouse-shooting.
By all means put an end to that. But pointing out lower-than-average tree cover is environmentally misleading.
That’s exactly right. I have to wonder if the “plant more trees everywhere” people have ever seen moorland in their lives. Have they even visited Cornwall? Moorland is not treeless because people have cut down the trees, and/or refused to plant any. Trees don’t grow there, because they can’t.
Perhaps they should spend some time actually looking at the land instead of complaining to people who, rightly in my opinion, have decided that they’re nuts and not worth the effort of a reply. Try persuading people living on land which can support trees to plant some!
We’re living on a small patch of land surrounded by farmland. We have planted a lot of trees, mostly willow, but they aren’t very big and never will be. The soil is shallow, even where we’ve added extra to level the land a bit, and rock isn’t far below the surface. Even the ancient blackthorn across the road is only about ten feet tall, and – like trees in exposed parts of Cornwall – is bent towards the East, and its branches all point that way. Constant Westerly winds will do that, sculpting trees into something strange. We’ve used the shelter of buildings where we can, but mostly what we have are shrubs. Only the zombie elder is thriving, in the shelter of the house. It has grown dozens of stems, and despite having been pretty much levelled when our house was built and losing all but the stoutest stems in a storm a few years ago, even that’s only about twelve feet tall. We also have a sycamore; those are almost as hard to kill as elder, but it’s only about eight feet tall.
It is simply not possible to grow tall trees where they can’t grow a decent root system. They’ll only reach a height which the root system can support.
Not to mention that planting trees on peat bogs leads to dewatering, which leads to the peat oxidising and releasing carbon. There was an article recently about some forests planted over peat bogs being felled and left to rot once this was realised.
Peat bogs are also important to making good whisky, so I support them on that basis alone.
I hear ya Screechy!
I just spent a week marvelling at Cornwall’s diagonal trees (also: wishing I brought warmer clothes). Tigger is right, trees can’t grow everywhere and a lot of Cornwall is firmly no-tree territory. Of course there are also parts of Cornwall where you get tree ferns the size of circus tents, but you can’t cram more trees into those places.
tigger_the_wing@1, you’re absolutely correct about trees. That is to say, I’m not a climate scientist, but I’m close friends with several, and they all say that “planting trees is great, but it’s not an effective CO2 mitigation strategy”, for exactly the reasons you state. Here in the USA, they recommend preserving and enhancing grasslands, because the grass grows faster and in more diverse climates. (We don’t have extensive peat bogs, afaik.)