As you will know by now (we hope!), the RSPB has been campaigning hard these past few months to get Government to phase out the use of peat in horticulture.
Why? Because extracting peat destroys vital wildlife habitats and is responsible for loads of greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, there are plenty of peat-free alternatives available, making phasing out peat a no-brainer.
Government accepts this argument but seem remarkably reluctant to do anything meaningful about it. For the past dozen years, we have had a voluntary approach to phasing out peat use, with a target of using 90% peat alternatives by 2010. The result has been a spectacular failure - growing media in the UK is still 70% peat!
Even many of the big gardening businesses have had enough of this. They, like us, are calling for a meaningful Government intervention to deliver peat-free gardens and businesses. They recognise that a voluntary approach will do nothing to address the fact that peat-free is currently more expensive than peat, and lets companies who don’t care about the environment to get away with doing nothing – ‘free-riding’ on the efforts of others as economists like to call it.
In spite of this, Defra appear wedded to a voluntary approach for another decade. They subscribe to the idea that people just need a ‘nudge’ to do the right thing.
There is clearly a role for voluntary agreements. They can help pioneer new, more environmentally-sound technologies, for example. But they rarely offer long-term solutions to environmental problems. Just look at the failure of voluntary approaches to replace lead in gunshot, to deliver widespread responsible pesticide use, for example. And we all know what happened as a result of soft approaches to regulation in the banking system...
So, Mr Benyon, please listen to those who want to meet Government peat replacement targets, and let’s have a proposal that delivers us a regulatory framework that will spell out the end of peat use, whilst supporting the British horticultural industry.
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Blogger – Jim Densham – Senior Land Use Policy Officer – RSPB Scotland The issue of peat being dug out of our countryside for use by gardeners featured on The One Show just the other evening. Perhaps the editor had been prompted by Harry Huyton’s previous blog ( A nudge is a fudge )?
In Scotland we have our own share of lowland raised bogs being damaged through this practice, leading to the loss of some of our most special places for wildlife and one of our natural defences against climate change. In its recent White Paper , Defra published milestones to phasing out peat for horticulture, but these targets don’t apply to Scotland. So, this week we sought a friendly Member of the Scottish Parliament to ask a few pertinent questions in Parliament about the Scottish Government’s policy on peat extraction for commercial use. We look forward to the answers and to increasing the pressure for a similar phase out in Scotland.
This week I will be attending a conference in Stirling organised by the IUCN Peatland Programme and launching a new report to coincide with it. A large proportion of our peatland areas, like raised bogs, are damaged and contributing to climate change instead of helping to fight it. We know that if we restore peatlands to a healthy and functioning state they can return to being good for wildlife and beneficial for the climate. We want to make sure that the vast amounts of carbon they store in their deep peat soils stays where it is rather then being lost to the atmosphere. Scotland’s peatlands hold a whopping 10 times the amount of carbon stored in the UK’s forests!
Restoring peatlands will need strong political commitment and money. It will also need policy change. Our new report cites numerous examples of policies that influence how peatlands are managed (too many to go into here). It concludes that they don’t pull together for the goal of restoration and reducing greenhouse gas emissions – in fact, too often they can actually conflict and stop this goal being achieved. We are asking Government to update, adapt and align its policies and to remove these remaining barriers. We are also continuing to call for Government to commit to restoring 600,000 hectares of peatland in Scotland – for the benefit of wildlife and the climate.