Peat covers about twelve per cent of the UK. Underneath that unglamorous, boggy surface sits the country’s single largest store of carbon, over three billion tonnes of it, built up slowly over thousands of years.
Right now, roughly eighty per cent of it is degraded, drained and drying out. A landscape built to lock carbon away has been quietly turned into one that leaks it instead, releasing something in the region of twenty million tonnes of carbon dioxide across the UK every year.
That is finally being taken seriously, and the money behind it just got a great deal bigger.
What Went Wrong
Peatlands only work as carbon stores when they are wet. Waterlogged conditions stop the dead plant matter that makes up peat from fully decomposing, which is exactly how it manages to lock carbon away for centuries rather than releasing it back into the air.
Centuries of drainage for farming, extraction for fuel and horticulture, and burning on grouse moors changed that equation across most of the country’s peatland. Dry peat decomposes. Decomposing peat releases carbon. A landscape that should be one of Britain’s most effective tools against climate change has instead been quietly working against it for generations, and largely out of sight, since bog and moorland rarely make it onto anyone’s list of scenic priorities worth protecting.
The Money That Just Landed
Three weeks ago, the government announced £47 million in new funding specifically to protect and restore England’s peatlands, part of a wider Peat Programme running through to 2030. It follows an existing commitment to restore 280,000 hectares of peatland by 2050, with 30,000 hectares already restored under the Nature for Climate Peatland Grant Scheme and a further 35,000 in the pipeline through Landscape Recovery.
Part of the new money is going toward something less glamorous but genuinely necessary: growing the workforce that actually does this work. A £1.15 million Sector Capacity Grant Scheme is aimed squarely at the practical bottleneck, there simply aren’t enough trained people and enough infrastructure yet to restore peatland at the pace the targets require. Funding the restoration is only half the job if there is nobody available to do the rewetting, the drain blocking and the sphagnum replanting that the work actually involves.
Private Money Is Getting Involved Too
Public funding is not carrying this alone. The UK Land Carbon Registry now lists more than three hundred peatland restoration projects in progress, covering upward of 44,000 hectares, a meaningful share of it funded through the voluntary carbon market via the UK Peatland Code. Businesses paying into genuine, verified restoration projects rather than funding restoration and hoping the accounting works out later.
That model has its critics, and rightly so, since carbon markets can drift toward box ticking if not properly scrutinised. But it has also brought private money into a corner of conservation that used to rely almost entirely on public grants, and the scale of projects now underway suggests it is doing real work rather than sitting on paper.
Why a Bog Is Worth This Much Fuss
A restored peatland does considerably more than store carbon. It acts as a natural sponge, soaking up heavy rainfall and releasing it slowly, which matters more each year as flooding becomes a bigger part of British winters. It filters water before it reaches rivers downstream. It provides breeding habitat for wading birds and homes for species that live almost nowhere else.
None of that shows up on a postcard the way a beach or a forest does. A restored bog does not look dramatically different from a degraded one to anyone glancing at it from a car window. But underneath, it has gone from actively working against the climate to actively working for it, and that distinction is worth a great deal more than the view suggests.
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