'Protect peatlands to save planet - they're our most important carbon store'

Thousands of us are unwittingly contributing to devastating damage to the UK’s most important carbon store, our peatlands, essential in the fight against climate change.

Garden centres, DIY stores and major supermarkets are likely to be banned by 2024 from selling peat-based compost under new plans to protect the natural world and limit carbon emissions.

But The Wildlife Trusts say the ban should be immediate to stop thousands more tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.

Peatlands, like the ones above in the North York Moors, are a key carbon store – the largest in the UK. Extracting peat for use in horticulture releases carbon emissions, damaging key wildlife habitats, and reducing the landscape’s ability to absorb water and curb flooding.

Investing in efforts to restore ­peatlands to combat climate change while allowing extraction of peat to continue is illogical and an inefficient use of public money, warn The Wildlife Trusts.

Estate owners are coming under increasing pressure to stop setting fire to the peat (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)

New analysis found how peat extracted for UK horticulture in 2020 could release up to 880,000 tons of CO2 over its lifetime – the equivalent to driving an average passenger car 2.2billion miles – to the moon and back more than 4,600 times.

If peat is left undisturbed – in bogs, not bags – this quantity of peat could have stored approximately 238,000 tons of carbon for millennia to come.

Waiting until 2024 to ban the use could add more than 1.5 million tons of CO2 to our atmosphere (roughly equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of more than 214,000 UK residents) while further contributing to species and habitat decline, says The Wildlife Trusts.

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Peat extracted for UK horticulture in 2020 could release up to 880,000 tons of CO2 (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)

Ailis Watt, The Trusts’ Peat Policy Officer, said: “These losses are irrecoverable, gigantic and unjustifiable.

"Peat and the carbon stored in it cannot be replenished within human lifetimes.

"Each time governments dither over whether to ban its use in horticulture, we risk losing more habitat that has taken millennia to develop, as well as losing its huge capacity for carbon storage.

“The UK is already one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries and extracting peat destroys complex ­ecosystems that are vital for nature’s recovery. It has to stop.”

The Wildlife Trusts are urging the public to respond to the Government consultation – open until March 18.