How Natural England's best hope has become to pray for rain

Defra and Natural England have been lucky so far. It started raining just after they persuaded Minister Mary Creagh to stop rotational cool burning, and it has rained more or less continuously since. The downside is that all this time the vegetation is growing. When the hills dry out, there will be the devil to pay.

One of our nation's greatest pieces of good fortune is that centuries of managing peatlands for pasturage and shooting have, almost by chance, kept our vast stores of precious peat safe. Some has been used as fuel, but most remains intact. The most important thing is to keep it that way.

We know how. We simply continue, and where possible improve, the systems that have worked for centuries — possibly millennia. On what used to be called heather moorland, now redesignated blanket bog, wet heath or dry heath, this includes cool rotational burning. Done in winter and early spring, when the cold wet peat will not burn but above-ground vegetation will, it reduces and breaks up the fuel load. This makes summer wildfires less likely, less damaging, and easier to stop.

Natural England has persuaded the Minister otherwise. Their claim is that cool burning alters the botanical balance, increasing heather and making wildfire more likely. The NE plan: rewet the peat, stop burning, remove grazing animals. This, they say, will make wildfire impossible — and if the impossible proves possible after all, will make the damage less serious.

The system to be imposed on 1.6 million acres of upland Britain rests on a single assertion: "Fully functioning blanket bog is a climax habitat that does not require management intervention."

Yet the 322-page review NE produced to inform the Minister devotes just four pages to wildfire, of which just four paragraphs address the evidence — and those paragraphs say nothing to inform the reader.

This is remarkable, because NE's "wet and walk away" approach is not novel. It has been applied for over a decade on conservation industry land and where NE has control. It would have been easy to assess whether the claim holds up.

Nowhere in those four pages does NE address the roaring fire in the corner of the room. It is surely inconceivable that the review's authors were unaware of the wildfires that have raged across "wet and walk away" peatland: Forsinard, Corrimony, Moray, Stac Pollaidh, Loch Ken, Darwen, Winter Hill, Stalybridge, Saddleworth, Marsden (repeatedly), Meltham, Crowden, Dove Stone, the Goyt, Woodhead, Howden, vast fires at Carr Bridge and Dava, and Fylingdales and Langdale Moor. The majority on land that was, according to NE, "naturally protected against wildfire."

Why did they feel the Minister did not need to know that peatlands managed exactly as they prescribed were the major constituent of the worst wildfire year in our history?

Does it matter? Why is a wildfire worse than a keeper's cool burn?

Small cool burns in winter and early spring create a mosaic of plants at different ages, enriching the habitat. Big summer wildfires impoverish the landscape by creating huge single-aged stands. Two Saddleworth fires burned out blocks of seven and 1.5 square miles respectively — now vast expanses of uniform vegetation.

Keeper burns cost the state nothing. Wildfires make huge demands on the public purse, often burning for days or weeks. The seven-square-mile fire on Winter Hill in 2018 was fought for a month.

The smoke from small, rapid, oxygen-rich burns disperses quickly. Big wildfires, especially when they reach the underlying peat, produce massive air pollution events. The Stalybridge fire in 2018 is estimated to have exposed 4.5 million people to micro-particulates.

Wildfires risk the immense carbon stores locked in these moors; keepers' fires do not. The Stalybridge fire, on land where NE had forbidden cool burning, is estimated to have released half a million tonnes of CO₂ and destroyed seven centimetres of peat across the site.

At a replacement rate of roughly one centimetre every 20–30 years, restoring that peat would take 150–220 years. But if the vegetation remains unmanaged, it will likely burn again in another 20–30 years, doubling the timeline to 300–450 years — and burning again every generation thereafter unless sanity returns.

Stalybridge was not an outlier. The 2019 Moray wildfire released an estimated 700,000 tonnes of stored carbon. The RSPB's Sutherland reserve fire released nearly 300,000 tonnes. One and a half million tonnes from just three wildfires.

There is the argument that cool burning itself contributes to climate change. It does not. Some CO₂ is released, but plant material is also converted to inert charcoal and biochar incorporated into the peat. The vegetation regrows and reabsorbs what was released. Over a burning cycle, cool burning produces a small net reduction in atmospheric CO₂. When peat burns, that stored carbon is lost for good.

Much of our lowland peat has already gone — exhausted for fuel or arable agriculture. It is our nation's good fortune that upland peat stores have been kept safe. That is now being put at risk for no better reason than the absolute certainty of a small number of NE staff — certainty that is impressive, but misplaced and alarming when viewed against the wildfires that continue to ravage land they insist cannot and will not burn.