Latest News | 23 January 2025

Trust’s project to restore peatland gets underway

Bondholders:
Derbyshire Wildlife Trust
University of Derby
Share this post:

A Derbyshire Wildlife Trust project to help famers and landowners to generate sustainable income, while facilitating nature’s recovery, has started thanks to a five-figure grant.

In the third round of the Carbon Innovation Fund, a partnership between the Co-op and its charity, the Co-op Foundation, the trust was selected as one of seven organisations across the UK to develop innovative ways to grow the food without damaging precious peatlands.

Peatlands are some of the most carbon-rich ecosystems on Earth, storing twice as much carbon as the world’s forests, and play a role in cooling the planet, supporting biodiversity and reducing flood risk.

However, because peatland is also nutrient rich, it is sometimes drained to grow crops or broken up to put the peat into compost.

According to the trust, degradation of peatland causes greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and destroys some of the UK’s most important ecosystems.

The primary purpose of Derbyshire Wildlife Trust’s project, which has secured more than £80,000 from the Carbon Innovation Fund, is to investigate the possibility of maintaining or improving farm income and calorie output while delivering lowland peatland restoration and nature recovery.

Working in partnership with three farmers, the trust will build on its expertise regarding the sales of ecosystem services (e.g. natural flood management, water filtration, and carbon storage) and explore markets for alternative products to traditional beef, sheep and dairy production to investigate opportunities for peatland restoration alongside sustainable food production.

Ruth Pilbeam, the trust’s Derwent Living Forest Programme manager, who is leading the project, said: “We understand the challenges that farmers and landowners face generating sustainable income while trying to support peatland restoration.

“That’s why our approach to transforming farm business models and collating evidence by monitoring conservation action and impacts on peatland, will enable nature’s recovery to exist alongside food security, and inform future peat restoration actions on farmland.

“Through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with the University of Derby, Derbyshire Wildlife Trust has developed tools for sensing and modelling landscape change under rewilding management for the purpose of understanding the opportunities for natural capital and associated ecosystem services.

“We have learned how to successfully classify land use and characteristics using remote sensing rather than traditional ground surveying to record data on peatland condition.

“This will provide ongoing feedback on progress of management practices, which farmers can use to report to investors who are paying for the ecosystem services delivered.

“This method will hugely reduce the costs of ongoing monitoring and will therefore reduce the maintenance costs investors need to pay to make peatland restoration a viable option for farm businesses.”


Related Articles...

This will close in 0 seconds