When glaciers retreated after the last ice age, the persistent cool and wet Scottish weather created the perfect conditions for a very special place to form – so special that it has been put forward as a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site.
As the sun breaks through the clouds, a warm glow illuminates the undulating land and lifts the mist. The dull, brown colour turns golden for an instant, and splashes of vivid greens, burnt orange and crimson red are revealed. The surfaces of dozens of scattered dark-bottomed pools shimmers softly.
A breeze – or a gale – chases away the small, blood-thirsty midges that otherwise hang about. The landscape seems to go on as far as the eye can see under big, wide skies. The burns, streams and rivers swell, and carry the water all the way from the peatlands to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. We are in the North of Scotland, and this is the Flow Country.
But other than this wild, raw beauty, why is it so special?
In the Flow Country, Sphagnum mosses, along with cotton grass and shrubs have grown slowly for thousands of years, but have decayed even slower. Over time, this has allowed peat – the partially decomposed remains of plants – to accumulate. In the Flow Country, peat has cloaked 4000 km2 and in places, to depths of more than 6.5 meters, making it the largest peatland of its kind in Europe and possibly the world. The range of conditions and landforms found between the mountains in the west of Sutherland and the rugged Caithness coast has enabled distinct forms of peatland to develop, each with unique surface patterns and highly specialised vegetation communities adapted to the local climate. As well as plants, assemblages of micro-organisms, invertebrates, birds and mammals also depend on the Flow Country to survive and are not replicated anywhere else on the planet.
In this peat, the Flow Country also holds an estimated 400 Mt of Carbon – this nearly twice as much as in all the woodlands and forests of Great Britain. Yet it is but a small fraction of the estimated 600 Gt of carbon stored in all the peatlands of the world - according to the United Nations Environment Programme, that’s more than twice as much carbon as the world’s forests hold. And peatlands do that despite occupying only 3% of the Earth’s land area, making them second only the Oceans in their climate-cooling capacity over millennial scales.
But this carbon, and the highly specialised species assemblages that have enabled peatland to persist for millennia, are under threat. Research has shown that global degradation of peatlands, mostly through land-use conversion for agriculture and forestry, has already turned our most efficient terrestrial carbon sink into a net source of CO2 to the atmosphere. That’s because disturbances, and particularly drainage, disrupt the delicate imbalance that stops organic matter from accumulating slowly. Once exposed to oxygen, the carbon held in the peat is therefore returned to the atmosphere at a much faster pace, fuelling global climate change.
Much like the rest of the world’s peatlands, the Flow Country bear the imprints of centuries of human activities, from cutting to grazing to burning. In the 1980s, controversial afforestation took place over 67,000 ha in the Flow Country fuelled by a government led tax-intensive scheme, driven by timber shortage after the Second World War. Following the recognition of the conservation value of the Flow Country and changes in legislation removing the subsidies, the first attempts to reverse those changes and restore the Flow Country started more than 25 years ago, led by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Peatland restoration initiatives started in many other countries around the same time, and today, peatland restoration is widely recognised as an essential element of a global strategy to mitigate climate change and reduce emissions.
Scotland currently has ambitious restoration targets and leads the way with their “Peatland Action” programme, funded by the Scottish Government and managed by the statutory agency Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH). Since 2012, this programme has added to other restoration initiatives and funding support (for example from EU LIFE) to deliver 50,000 ha of restoration management. Having declared a climate emergency in 2019, the government has now announced that a further £250M will continue to fund peatland restoration activities over the next ten years, in what the UN has declared to be the “Decade of Ecosystem Restoration”.
Underpinning these restoration activities, a rich and varied community of researchers continuously work to deepen our understanding of how peatlands are responding to the compounded threats of land use and climate change, as well as restoration. NGOs like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Plantlife, government agencies like SNH and Forest and Land Scotland, the James Hutton Institute, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, several of the UK’s Universities and even landowners and managers have joined forces to take the science, and the practice of peatland restoration further. The alignment of the science, the practice and the governance towards a common purpose is yet another thing that makes the Flow Country such a special place.
So why should the Flow Country be celebrated, and why should we care, more generally about peatlands? Perhaps because for so long, the astonishing contribution they can make to global climate and water regulation, and to biodiversity, has been overlooked and underappreciated.
Perhaps because time is running out to not care about the carbon beneath our feet.
Dr Roxane Andersen is the Chair of the National Peatland Research and Monitoring Group. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.