The need to protect peatland can no longer be ignored, says Erin McDaid, of Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust

I’ve been a keen gardener for almost 40 years and I have to admit that in the early days I was guilty of using a lot of peat.

In my early 20s I discovered that the peat used in horticulture was taken from fragile habitats and that these were being stripped bare across much of their range so I started looking for alternatives. They were hard to come by and pretty poor quality.

Thankfully, as awareness grew about the habitat loss, alternatives became more widely available and the quality gradually improved.

The wildlife trusts were at the forefront of efforts to persuade gardeners to change their ways.

Protections were put in place to prevent the loss of peat from UK habitats but the industry continued to drive demand and peat was increasingly imported from places such as the Republic of Ireland.

While peat-free alternatives can be bought in most DIY stores and garden centres, the majority of compost used and bought by gardeners still contains peat and bags of pure peat are still marketed as soil ‘improvers’ when there are a myriad of more sustainable options.

You still have to actively seek out peat-free options, and this must change. As gardeners we must also put pressure on growers to use peat-free compost when producing plants for us to buy, otherwise we are effectively turning a blind eye to the destruction of yet more peatland.

Today, we understand the significance of peat reserves as a natural store of huge quantities of CO2 as well as the value of peatlands to wildlife and as a means of storing and purifying our water and we have to make these arguments stick.

The natural process of carbon from the atmosphere being locked away long-term in plants, soils and rock strata is known as carbon sequestration and peatland is one of the most important natural sequestering habitats.

These wetland landscapes feature unique waterlogged soils full of organic matter from dead and decaying plants. Over time this becomes peat.

In the UK there are three general types of peatland ­— blanket bog, such as those found in the Peak District, raised bog as found just north of the county at Thorne and Hatfield Moors, and Fens such as those of Lincolnshire and East Anglia.

As well as storing carbon, peatlands help alleviate flooding by naturally slowing the flow of water and as water passes through it is naturally filtered ­— with 70% of our drinking water coming from upland areas dominated by peat.

Shockingly over 80% of the UK’s peatlands are damaged.

As they are stripped, burned or allowed to dry out, their ability to take on carbon is destroyed and existing stores are released into the atmosphere as CO2.

While the fight to save rainforest habitat has become something of an emblem for the environmental movement and the impact of deforestation on climate is widely understood and abhorred, the impact of destroying precious peatland, here in the UK and overseas, is less widely known; and in some quarters ignored.

With looming climate and ecological crises no longer reasonably in doubt this has to change. The time to act is now ­— not just for peat’s sake but for all our futures.

Two decades on, The Wildlife Trusts and others are still fighting for a halt to the destruction of peatlands and the burning of uplands and at a local level we can all support this by backing their campaigns and by going peat-free in our gardens.

For more information, go to https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/actions/how-go-peat-free