Yorkshire’s upland peatlands store carbon over millennia; filter our drinking water; help slow the flow of rain off the moors, mitigating flooding downstream; they are a home to fascinating and beautiful specialist wildlife found in few other places. This is when they are healthy, of course – post war agricultural policy left them in a bit of a state and, like other partners across the Great North Bog, we are working to address that.

We’re still doing the sums for our 25/26 restoration season but we're looking at almost 55,000 ha of upland peatland coming into restoration management since 2009. For reference, Bradford Metropolitan District is about 36,520 ha. It’s a remarkable achievement and one of which the team is rightly proud. It’s also something we could not have accomplished without the co-operation, collaboration and support of landowners and managers, local authorities, National Park Authorities, National Landscape Partnerships, all of our many partners and funders. “And funders” is a really important clause, here. 

We’re grateful to all of our many funders, of course, to Yorkshire Water, Peoples’ Postcode Lottery, Esmée Fairbairn, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, Defra, Natural England - you can find the full list in our latest annual report. One of the funding streams that has made a remarkable difference in a short space of time is the Nature for Climate Peatland Grant Scheme. 

Looking through our progress reports since 2009, and with the aid of some back-of-an-Excel-spreadsheet-calculations, you can see that we averaged 3,048 ha of restoration works per annum between 2009 and the 20/21 restoration seasons. NfCPGS kicked in over the 21/22 restoration season; between then and the 24/25 season, we averaged 8,465 ha restoration works per annum. 

That doubling of previous annual outputs occurred across a mixture of new sites; this mix is important because restoration is an iterative process – it’s not just a matter of visiting a site once, slapping in some sediments traps and then forgetting it. We need to be able to go back year on year to assess progress and then make adjustments and additions. We couldn’t have achieved this step-change in pace without NfCPGS, but the scheme doesn’t just fund capital works, it also:

• funds restoration surveys so that, when a “shovel-ready” funding opportunity presents itself, a site can slot straight into that funding stream
• funds staff so that we have capacity to carry out the work
• funds equipment like vehicles so that we can get those staff to the remote sites on which we work
• funds pre- and post-restoration monitoring so that we can understand the effect of our interventions in real time and make adjustments to improve efficacy
• funds capacity-building so that the sector can expand to meet challenging climate-change targets
• provides a platform for attracting funding from charitable trusts and the private sector

NfCPGS will close in April 2027, leaving us with quite the funding gap; current Government thinking is that future restoration will be funded through Countryside Stewardship, Landscape Recovery Schemes and the carbon market. While agri-environment schemes are welcome and will support some activity, they will not match the scale and speed of a dedicated upland peat funding programme. Whatever the future merits of the carbon market, right now it is not sufficiently mature to meet the scale of the challenge before us.

Our peatlands are too precious a resource and, speaking from a Wildlife Trust point of view, too precious a habitat simply to be an add-on, almost an afterthought, in an agri-environment scheme. Upland peatland restoration needs a dedicated successor fund to NfCPGS. This will help us maintain our delivery momentum and ensure that agri-environment schemes and private finance can build on, rather than replace, strong public investment.