England’s ‘national rainforests’ to be protected through new legislation to prevent heather burning on blanket bog
The government has today announced plans to bring forward legislation to prevent the burning of heather and other vegetation on protected blanket bog habitats. The new regulations will prevent the burning of any specified vegetation on areas of deep peat (over 40cm depth) on a Site of Special Scientific Interest that is also a Special Area of Conservation or a Special Protection Area unless a licence has been granted or the land is steep or rocky.
‘Rotational’ burning is used as a management tool on moorland and blanket bog. Land managers use controlled burning on patches of heather during winter months typically on a 8-12 year rotation. There is a consensus that burning of vegetation on blanket bog is damaging to peatland formation and habitat condition. It makes it more difficult or impossible to restore these habitats to their natural state and to restore their hydrology.
Restoring England’s peatlands is a priority for the government. It will help achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as well as protecting our valuable habitats, and the biodiversity those habitats support. Blanket bog, a type of peatland, is a delicate habitat of international importance, with the UK having 13% of the world’s blanket bog.
The government recognises that if moorland is unmanaged, there is a risk of wildfire which is most damaging of all and that these risks have grown due to climate change. Therefore, the government intends to work with land owners and managers to develop local wildfire control plans. There will be specific circumstances where the ban does not apply, such as on steep land or where scree makes up half the land area. In addition, the Secretary of State may also issue licences for the burning of heather on blanket bog for the purposes of wildfire prevention, for a conservation purpose or where land is inaccessible to cutting or mowing machinery. These licences may cover several years so that they can be aligned with coherent management plans for sites.
Environment Secretary George Eustice said: “Our peatlands have great potential as a natural store of carbon, as well as protecting habitats, providing a haven for rare wildlife and being a natural provider of water regulation. We want to work with land owners to restore the natural hydrology of many of these sites through our new agricultural policy to support our ambitions for the environment. The burning of heather on these sites makes it more difficult to restore their natural hydrology which is why we are taking this step today.”.
Natural England Chair Tony Juniper said: “This is a hugely welcome announcement which will see better protections for our globally important peatlands. Blanket bog is an amazing habitat that provides essential environmental benefits, including carbon storage, a home for wonderful wildlife, clean drinking water and flood mitigation. This is why it is vital we ensure these systems are healthy with peat-forming species, such as Sphagnum mosses, thriving in water-logged conditions.
We will continue to work with Defra and land managers to help with the successful implementation of these measures, including by providing advice on good upland management and leading a new peatland restoration grant scheme as part of the Nature for Climate programme. This will provide funds to carry out restoration work on these precious ecosystems, ensuring their recovery and protection for the benefit of both present and future generations.”.
Today’s move marks a key step for meeting the Government’s nature and climate change mitigation and adaptation targets, and part of the Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan commitment to bring 75% of SSSIs into favourable condition.
ENDS
More on this later today.
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Far too many get out clauses!
My thoughts exactly.
Yeah, I bet there is suddenly a lot of 39cm deep bog discovered on grouse moors. And the BBC’s moor owner’s propaganda show, Countryfile, will have a nice piece showing them measuring it with a school ruler and declaring that it is fine. ‘Cause that is just what Countryfile does.
It doesn’t look as though it would be very difficult to get round these restrictions. How much peatland has Defra actually protected?
I think you are spot on with your comments.
The Moorland Assoc seem to agree with you. This is what they have put up :-
” Moorland managers do not burn peat. Removing the heather canopy by controlled burning does not harm the peat or moss underneath and allows more light in to the understory of vegetation. This benefits a range of peat-forming plants and also birds of conservation concern, such as golden plover and curlew”.
That sounds like they think it will be business as usual. Rules and laws do not normally apply to the industry they represent do they? Why should this be any different?
DEFRA have had top men construct a model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZT-wVnFn60
“There will be specific circumstances where the ban does not apply, such as on steep land or where scree makes up half the land area.” Thought this was already banned or at least not allowed under the muirburn code.
Not that adhering to the Code is universal. Just ravel down Glen Clunie to Braemar and see what you think of the muirburn there!
We need to stop burning the uplands to mitigate climate change. No ifs no buts.
Rotational burning is carried out to increase numbers of Red Grouse and has nothing to do with wildfire mitigation. This is a red herring.
Has anyone worked out what the CO2 emissions are to shoot a single Red Grouse or that produced by driven grouse shooting as a whole.
I can remember not that long ago reporting a Yorkshire keeper for burning through broken rock on a steep slope cost them a years wildlife enhancement money.
There are far too many get out clauses that will probably allow the DGS criminals, sorry moor owners, to be able to allow their minions, the criminals on the ground, sorry gamekeepers, to burn where they like. the proposals should also include compulsory rewetting, this reduces heather growth, increases plant biodiversity, carbon storage as well as making cutting burning very much less necessary.
They might as well just ban burning on any day that doesn’t end in “day”.
Has anyone ever explained why shallow peat would be any less vulnerable to damage than deep peat?
…and whatever you think of Natural England, how are they supposed to monitor this? There aren’t enough staff to be out and about assessing actual or proposed burning against a set of very complex criteria
We the interested amateurs will need to do that as in fact “Moorland Monitors” have in fact already been doing, probably much to the chagrin of the burners.
Evidently, it must be quite easy for criminals to hide a dead hen harrier or immobilise a tracking device. Not so see easy to disguise heather ablaze on moorland. An association of moorland monitors sounds good to me!
Yes an awful lot of loopholes. Rather pleasing though that there are references here to restoring hydrology and flood mitigation. Not expressed especially prominently, but they are there and that amounts to public acknowledgement that ‘management’ for driven grouse shooting conflicts with the teensy weensy issue of reducing floods downhill. Surely no one including those lovely people who own grouse moors and shoot grouse would want in anyway to compromise keeping homes dry so birds can be killed for fun would they?
That’s excellent, because I’m sure they’d be delighted to know the full toolkit for curtailing the devastation floods cause people and other businesses doesn’t just mean stopping or changing what’s already happening on grouse moors, but adding new elements too. There’s quite a few of them creating a lot more opportunity to retain water on the moors than just by knocking muirburn on the head a bit. There’s targeted tree planting on contours and the riparian zone for starters – just google ‘Pontbren project’ for a truly inspiring read and then ‘wild trout trust videos Grazing Exclusion: Reduced Silt, Pollution and Flash Flood Risk’ for an amazing piece of film that backs up the claims for Pontbren. Then there’s insertion of woody material in streams so they form leaky dams that hold back water when rainfall gets heavier – https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hardcastle-crags/features/natural-flood-management.
Of course the beaver deserves a very special mention, there’s still something Monty Pythonish, surreal/unreal thinking about beavers up on our rather humdrum grouse moors so good to overcome that by pushing that thought to the forefront as often as possible. They would only have to settle in and build their dams on the lower parts of the moors where the gradient is shallowest and the streams widest to affect the vast majority of the water that flows off the grouse moor. The extremes of flood and drought downstream would both be reined in to a greater or lesser degree. A few years of growth from the heeled in willow, alder, birch and rowan which by itself would hold water back and beavers would be ready to go. There might also be the option of instead of quadzillions of volunteers spending quadzillions of hours building hundreds of leaky dams as at Hardcastle NTS, woody material can be shipped in periodically from tree surgery jobs, canal restorations etc and let the beavers get on with doing it for us 24/7. Chuck in some out of date carrots, cabbages, tatties and parsnips from the supermarket as a wee treat and we could be on to something. A good job the selfish grouse moor owner is a purely hypothetical being otherwise they’d be fair shitting themselves at the full practical and political implications of the beaver’s return.
All of this, especially the beaver’s efforts, means this real, imagined or exaggerated period of dangerous build up of fuel load if muirburn is reduced can be bypassed with generally damper moors and firebreaks such as strips of green woodland and widened watercourses. We can get out of the flammable cul de sac we’ve been put in by a couple of centuries of driven grouse shooting. Up in Scotland at least the gamekeeping fraternity has begun to compare themselves to those Australian aborigines aiding conservation efforts with their ‘firestick’ farming. What well meaning, but essentially silly sausages they are..bless them! Those keepers will be swapping their bagpipes for didgeridoos before we know it, although I suspect they already spend a lot of time playing with the latter it seems to be a lonely existence without many friends. No, we just need to get back towards the relatively fire proof landscape and ecosystems we had before DGS buggered them up.
To facilitate this process there’s a new petition for the Scottish Parliament that asks that a condition for granting the proposed licence for grouse shooting is ensuring that all measures have been taken to reduce a grouse moor’s role in contributing to floods downhill. Not doing so would mean keeping homes dry is being compromised by shooting birds for fun, that’s it in a nutshell it’s just making it obvious and inescapable. We need change across all the uplands, but the new licence provides an excellent opportunity to begin with grouse moors. The petitions team at Holyrood is excellent, but the page itself is badly laid out it’s easy to have not signed it, but think you have. Please remember to click on the wee black ‘Sign This’ box after ticking ‘I’m not a robot’. Your name will likely appear straightaway in the list of signatures the page carries. There’s no minimum number of signatures needed before a petition is discussed by Scotgov, but you can never have too many. Thanks – http://www.parliament.scot/gettinginvolved/petitions/PE01850
What a lot of tosh from this Government yet again. As others have said there are so many ifs and buts in what they say that any regulations will leak like sieves. I think this statement from Defra is more or less worthless in practice. Yet again, and we see this so many times, this Government is bending over backwards not to harm the shooting brigade.
The thing that takes the “biscuit” on this statement is that grants to landowners will be forthcoming to restore peat bogs. So effectively the shooters reap the profits from destroying peat bogs and then get paid for restoring them. No bad if you are in the Tory shooting circles.
One final point Mr. Juniper has certainly got the weasel words of propaganda, again what a load of tosh he produces.
A brilliant set of maps from Guy Shrubsole on Twitter overlaying all the different categories including peat depths over 40cm. Guy is a great resource.
We have farmed our peatland hill with sheep for many generations and have, whenever required practiced controlled light burns on the heather cover to benefit both the sheep grazing and the environment. We do not have any game shooting. The burns are carried out in the winter preferably with a light breeze as we do not wish to damage the sphagnum moss. This is very important as the moss is an invaluable absorber of carbon which when it decays turns into the peat which is the carbon storage. This builds up the peat depth at the rate of 300mm every thousand years, our peat is around 1500mm deep.
If the heather is not controlled with these light burns, it creates a two fold problem with the long heather, the sheep can’t access it and the long stalky heather no longer provides a dense shade which creates ideal growing conditions for the sphagnum moss. This can then lead to the potential of massive destructive wildfires which we experienced around 3 years ago, which released phenomenal amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and will take many years before being useful for their carbon attributes.
Should the farmers be rewarded for delivering these‘Public goods’ for wider society?
Well described Ian.
Beavers are over rated and live off grid. When floody rain is forecast are beavers going to get a text message to let some of their dammed water to store the impending forecast heavy rain. Their dams are overflowing always so do not mitigate flooding. They had to build a proper managed dam in Keilder forest to hold back water because trees are another red herring.
I’m actually cringing with embarrassment for your sake right now. It’s a piece of the most fundamental information about beavers that their dams are not like impermeable human made ones, but are somewhat leaky. When it rains the water level behind them rises as it backs up. When you have a succession of beaver dams then that adds up to one hell of a lot of water to be released slowly compared to the sudden surge that would rush downstream without beavers and greatly increase flood risk. There’s a very good reason why trial after trial is popping up from Cornwall to Pickering to Norfolk to see how well beavers reduce flood risk. Or do you know something the people involved with this don’t?
Les is right , the evidence is there that Beavers do help to mitigate flooding by slowing the flow , provide excellent habitat for other wildlife and are a keystone species we need in our ecosystems.
As for the issue of burning ,I think those that know how Grouse moors operate know that they will already be planning how to get round this legislation. With all the loopholes and serious lack of monitoring from the agencies that shouldn’t be too difficult for them.