Banning the burn: Natural England and selective blindness

What wasn't the minister told?

A lot of people who know a lot about moorland management think that the Defra minister Mary Creagh made a bad decision when she announced that rotational cool burning would be banned on any land where peat was deeper than 30cm.

We are not being unkind when we say that it is likely that she knows little about wildfire beyond what she has been told by her Defra officials, and they are supposed to be informed by Natural England (NE). As a result, it is unlikely that they know much about wildfire. Despite the widely held community view that NE policy is a cause of the worsening wildfire situation, NE have until recently taken little interest in the subject. It was not until this year that they sought to appoint a wildfire specialist.

This is not as surprising as it may seem. Whilst the decisions of NE and Defra might make wildfires more likely, and worse when they occur, they were tackled by the Fire and Rescue Service which was a Home Office responsibility, and is now under the Deputy Prime Minister. The costs are huge.  Defra and NE would want nothing to do with it.

But even the most uninformed Defra official must have been aware of the G7 protocol. Was Mary even told that earlier this year her government signed a document at the G7 in Canada that identified prescribed burning as an essential tool in the fight against wildfire? Saying something is essential and then banning it is, as they say, bad optics.

But the world will be a better place. Won't it?

The promised benefits are illusory or worse.

'Local communities are set to benefit from improved air quality, following an announcement that the government will extend the ban on burning vegetation on deep peat as part of new plans to protect both the environment and public health’. This is what Defra’s press release on the latest rules changes told the world.

No, they won't. Cool rotational burning only rarely impacts on local communities, and as it is only burning above-ground vegetation it contains few of the harmful particulates that are characteristic of wildfire burning into peat stores thousands of years old.

‘

The burning ban will protect our globally unique network of peatlands which are commonly referred to as the Earth’s lungs’. 

No, it won't. The risk is from the wildfires, as NE well know, and the ban makes them far more likely. Deep peat isn't commonly called ‘the Earth's Lungs’, and for good reason. If our lungs did gaseous exchange at the same rate as 30cm of peat, we would be on life support.

‘Peatlands improve water and air quality, create habitats for wildlife, absorb carbon and help protect communities from flooding. To deliver these benefits, they must be in a healthy condition but 80% of peatlands across England are dried out and deteriorating and actually emit carbon dioxide contributing to global warming’.

These things are being delivered by our moorlands now. The idea that 80% of England's moorlands are dried out and emitting carbon is a wild exaggeration. The Peatland Restoration Industry, who appear to be the source of this claim, are making a fortune out of the taxpayer. Based on this number, which on Defra's figures would be 1.3 million acres, the same people calculate that they will need around £21 billion from the taxpayer to repair the damage that only they can see. We wouldn't trust them more than any other snake-oil salesmen.

‘Burning vegetation on deep peat causes the release of harmful smoke into the air, impacting air quality across communities. This includes harmful air pollutants for human health, including ones strongly associated with strokes, cardiovascular disease, asthma and some lung cancers’.

They are conflating two separate things. Yes, some of these things are produced by burning anything, and chronic exposure can cause disease. But they are careful not to say that anything like that happens, because there is no evidence that burning small patches of vegetation in remote places in mid-winter has ever caused these diseases. With wildfires on the other hand, burning into the peat and emitting particulates for days and weeks, there is no doubt that they cause problems. Banning what rarely – if ever – causes a problem, only to make the real problem worse is idiotic.

“Our peatlands are England’s Amazon Rainforest – home to our most precious wildlife, storing carbon and reducing flooding downstream’.

This one started with the RSPB and is always the mark of someone who hasn't got a clue. Tropical rainforests are supercharged with heat and moisture. They are the equivalent of a Ferrari. Upland peat is cold and wet and the equivalent of a white van with a puncture. NE have helpfully identified around twenty plant species that they want to see on peatland. Brazil, a country that actually has rainforests, has so far identified 34,387 plant species. Our moorlands are precious, but are the ecological equivalent of rainforests only in the fevered imagination of a Defra speech writer who hasn't got a clue.

“Restricting burning will help us restore and rewet peatlands. These new measures will create resilient peatlands that are naturally protected from wildfires.”

This is the key to it all. How on earth can anyone claim that stopping a system of vegetation management that is known to be a vital tool in wildfire mitigation will create moorland that is 'naturally protected from wildfire'? Other countries who have banned prescribed burning are trying to reinstate it, and wish they had never banned it in the first place. NE and Defra know that. In a warming world, where drier and hotter weather is predicted, and in a year when wildfires – on land where rotational burning is already banned – have been worse than ever in recorded history, we get this rubbish from our regulator and our government.

How is this supposed to work? The problem is too much heather. Really? That's the plant that has been disappearing for decades.

If you rewet, you will get less heather because heather doesn't grow in the wet. Really? If you stop cool rotational burning the peat will be wetter and you will get less heather because heather won't grow in wet peat. Really? If you have less heather, and the peat is wetter, a miracle occurs, and wildfires become impossible. Really?

That is the theory that this ridiculous idea is based on. This is very interesting. Not because NE have come up with a brilliant theory that will solve a serious and worsening problem. It is interesting because, unless the NE and Defra experts who briefed the minister have been in Antarctica for the last decade, they already know that the theory doesn't work. 

The conservation industry have been enthusiasts of the theory, called Wet and Walk Away, for a decade. There are now lots of places where we can see how Wet and Walk Away 'naturally protects against wildfire.' The answer is, it doesn't. The places where the land has been rewet and burning stopped include nearly all the great wildfires of the last decade.

The list is long and too tedious to give in full, but a few will suffice. RSPB Forsinard, Dovestones, Corrimony and Crowden or National Trust Saddleworth, Howden and Marsden (repeatedly) or United Utilities at the Goyt and Darwin, or where NE has control at Winterhill and Stalybridge. Did NE not notice, or did they think it best not to confuse the minister?

What are we putting at risk?

We have most of the world's stock of heather moorland. It is a far rarer habitat than tropical rainforest that Defra compared it to. The importance of heather-dominated moorland has long been internationally recognised. The 1992 United Nations Rio Conference on Biodiversity ratified the global importance of the UK's heather moorland. Heather dominated moorland supports many biological communities that are either only found in the UK, or are better developed here than elsewhere. Of these communities, 13 are listed under EC Directive on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and Wild Flora and Fauna. Heather moorland supports unique assemblages of bird species, including 18 species of European and International importance.

Is it not incredible that NE does not even recognise this globally designated jewel in our biodiversity crown as a habitat? It no longer exists. Heather moorland is blanket bog, wet heath or dry heath. There is, according to NE ‘too much heather’, and its presence is an indication of land in an 'unsatisfactory condition.' It is their stated intention to reduce one of the world’s rarest habitats to a nuisance.

Will we have more wildfires?

What do you think? Things are bad enough as it is. Now the people who manage the lion's share of 1.6 million acres of moorland will be forced by an idiotic law to follow the plainly disastrous example of the RSPB, the National Trust and the rest. To this can be added that, when cool rotational burning is illegal there is no point in having the specialist kit to manage burns or in maintaining the skills that enable people to carry it out. Farmers and gamekeepers and their specialist equipment play a critical role in fighting wildfire. All that will go.

It's been getting worse, but we have seen not the worst of it yet. Every year the fuel load on 1.6 million acres will increase. Every year the kit on farms and estates will dwindle and decay. Every year the local pool of skill, and the enthusiasm to put your life on the line to solve a problem that Mary Creagh said would never happen, will diminish.

Power without any responsibility.

The people who live and work in these landscapes think that the banning of cool rotational burning is very stupid and will have massive and potentially fatal consequences for them and their communities, the landscape, its wildlife and its precious carbon stores. Happily, whatever happens, NE will be alright. Despite the enormous impact their decisions have on wildfire, they have absolutely no legal or financial responsibility for any of it. Wildfires are a different department’s budget.

Even better, the Peatland Restoration and Conservation Industries will get vast amounts of taxpayer cash. An additional 1.6 million acres of contracts stretch into the future. When announcing the ban, the minister said there would be £400 million over the next two years for tree planting and peatland restoration. A drop in the ocean compared to the Restoration Industry's estimate of up to £21 billion, but still plenty to keep them going for a couple of years.

This is such a travesty that it is quite likely that a future government will reverse it. A day may come when the hills are burning, and no one is there to fight the fires, when the architects of this fiasco will be called to account. Believe us, tragic though it will be to get there, that day will come.