Date published: 2007/03/28
The BBC says:
The UK government should conserve peat bogs as a way of curbing climate change, the National Trust is urging.
British bogs store carbon equivalent to about 20 years' worth of national industrial emissions, the Trust says.
But two centuries of damage in some regions mean bogs are drying out, releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
The Trust wants the government to reward landowners for looking after peatlands, and allow carbon credits for good peat conservation.
"The way we manage our peat moorlands has a massive bearing on our ability to tackle climate change," said Director General Fiona Reynolds.
"But this area is almost completely neglected in terms of any coherent policy response. It is the forgotten climate change timebomb."
It is estimated that globally, peat stores twice as much carbon as forests, and the UK contains about 15% of the world's peatlands.
...
What evidence there is suggests that in Scotland, bogs are still absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, while those close to England's traditional industrial heartlands have been turned by centuries of sulphur and heavy metal pollution into net sources of CO2.In the Trust's High Peak Estate in England's Peak District, scientists found that 1,350 hectares of degraded bog were releasing 37,000 tonnes of carbon per year - equivalent, it calculates, to the annual emissions of 18,000 cars.
This is a good example of how the usual figures for UK carbon emissions (or any other country in the world) use false accounting, since no impact of land use is included. Well, imported emissions and exported emissions are also not considered, and those probably provide a far bigger impact.
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