Restoring Wales's climate-saving peatlands

Rarer than the rainforest, more effective per acre than the Amazon

March 2012: A massive scheme to restore a large swathe of the Welsh landscape more effective per acre in storing greenhouse gases than the Amazon rainforest was completed earlier this month.

Everyone knows the value of the Amazon rainforest in tackling global warming but few realise a threatened ecosystem on our own doorstep plays a significant role in keeping harmful carbon out of the atmosphere, and even in extracting it from the air.

All of the world's forests combined only store half of the amount of carbon as the world's peatlands, and four per cent of the globe's rarest, deepest and most effective peatland - the blanket bog - is in Wales.

Significant damage has been caused over the years
While healthy peatlands store carbon and draw harmful carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, damaged peatlands actually release greenhouse gases. To tackle this significant problem, the National Trust has led a huge project to revitalise an enormous swathe of blanket bog in North Wales .

National Trust Wales's Wildlife and Countryside adviser Helen Buckingham said: ‘Over the centuries there had been repeated attempts to drain the blanket bog at the head of the Conwy river for shooting and farming, causing significant damage. Since January last year the National Trust has taken on a huge project to dam these drains to reverse the damage, and in just the last 13 months more than 30,000 dams have been built and 300km of drains closed.'

'You can't grow a rainforest overnight'
The near £300,000 damming project on the Migneint near Ysbyty Ifan carried out by local contractors has been funded by a £190,000 ecosystem resilience grant from the Welsh Government, £60,000 grant from the Rivers Trust and investment from the National Trust and the Countryside Council for Wales.

‘You can't grow a rainforest overnight but by blocking drainage ditches and rewetting peatland we can reduce carbon emissions by 2.6 tonnes per hectare, which is the equivalent of running the average family car for a year,' said Helen

‘There are just short of 20,000 hectares in the Special Area of Conservation that covers the Migneint. Peatlands only cover about three per cent of the Earth but they accumulate more carbon than tropical rainforests,' said biogeochemist Nancy Dise of Manchester Metropolitan University in her 2009 paper on global change. In terms of sitting there quietly, year after year, packing away massive amounts of carbon, nothing tops these peatlands.'
http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/welsh-amazon.html