Gardeners have been loading up with compost and plants as garden centres have reopened in the UK, except for Scotland. But compost made with peat is still being used by both gardeners and commercial growers, even though it is dug up from peatlands, devastating wild bogplants, wildlife, and sabotaging the fight against the climate crisis.
Peat is made up of dead plants saturated and preserved in water, locking away vast amounts of carbon in the plant remains. Peatlands account for about 3% of the Earth’s land area but hold more than one-third of all the carbon in soil, and more than twice as much as the world’s forests. But when peatlands are damaged they release their carbon, some 2bn tonnes of CO2 worldwide annually, more than 5% of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions.
Scotland has much of the UK’s peatland, including the largest single expanse of blanket bog in the world, the Flow Country in the far north of Scotland. Much of that peat was devastated by conifer plantations decades ago, but tax breaks that encouraged the tree planting on bogs were abolished in 1988 and in recent years a large area of the bog has been restored by getting rid of the conifer trees and drainage channels, raising the water level and encouraging bog plants to grow back and wildlife to return.
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