Conserving and restoring moorlands can slow down climate change

One India: Scientists have stressed that conserving and restoring the moorlands is important because they are some of the rarest habitats in the world, home to extremely rare animals and plants, and can also slow down climate change. Seventy-five per cent of the world's heather moorlands are in the UK. However, pollution, overgrazing and wild fires have damaged large areas.

Several organisations in the Peak District National Park in England are trying to restore and conserve the moorland habitat. Moorlands in good condition act as a valuable carbon sink that absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases, thereby slowing climate change.

The Peak District Moorlands currently stores between 16 and 20 million tonnes of carbon; and together with the rest of the UK's peat lands are the single largest carbon reserve in the UK-storing the equivalent of 20 years of UK carbon dioxide emissions…..

In the Peak District, view north from Barrow Moor, shot by Eirian Evans, Wikimedia Commons via the Geograph Project, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license