A single peat moor stores the carbon of 1,000,000 cars — and this 'climate-action trump card' needs urgent protection

One West Yorkshire moor stores an equivalent amount of carbon to that released annually by a million cars, find researchers from the University of Leeds, which is about three times more than previously thought.

Marsden Moor, which covers 5,683 acres between Manchester and Leeds, has been the subject of a study in which, for 100 days over the course of four years, university researchers, community volunteers and National Trust rangers have been testing peat depth and stratigraphy (the make up of different layers created over time) across 2,290 different locations. This thorough undertaking has provided an accurate estimate of the amount of peat on the estate — 21 million cubic tons, which stores between one and 1.5 million tons of carbon.

‘A good carbon storage estimate is extremely important as it can illustrate the value of these moorlands and their role in mitigating climate change,’ explains Antony Blundell, palaeoecologist and senior researcher into peatlands at the University of Leeds. ‘The work of the volunteers has allowed us to gather much more data than we would normally have available — so we expect a robust estimate of carbon storage to be derived from this project.’

"Peat is like a book — once you can read it, you can understand the history of a place"

Radiocarbon dating of the layers of peat — which forms from dead or decaying organic plant matter — shows it began to take form some 10,000 years ago and has grown ‘up to 1mm a year’, with the deepest areas more than five metres deep. ‘Some depths showed evidence of Stone Age fires and sites at other depths had evidence of ancient trees, including pine and birch, and others again showed partially degraded vegetation,’ adds Dr Blundell.

‘Peat is like a book — once you can read it, you can understand the history of a place and how you might restore it… From these preliminary findings, we can begin to create a database of peat quality and constituents linked to the vegetation across the estate, which should be unique in the UK.’

Concurrently, the National Trust, under the advice of the Calderdale Sphagnum Project (funded by the National Lottery), set up its first sphagnum-moss nursery last year and plugs will be ready for planting out this autumn. ‘The team has been able to locate areas where sphagnum moss and cotton sedges are strongly preserved in the peat, but are not present today because of 200 years of industrialisation and pollution,’ says Ian Dowson, Marsden National Trust area ranger. ‘We are confident they can flourish again.’

The National Trust owns 25,000 hectares (61,776 acres) of peatland across England, Wales and Northern Ireland (2.5% of the total), ‘of which 70% (17,500ha/43,243 acres) is currently in a degraded condition,’ says Tia Crouch, Trust peat ecologist. ‘Healthy peatlands are a climate-action trump card. Our vision is to have all the degraded peat-lands in our care under restoration by 2040. We are making good progress with restoration underway across nearly 6,000 hectares [14,826 acres] since 2021.’

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