Rishi has welcomed the start of work on a peat restoration project in the North York Moors – with the help of a £247,000 Government grant.
Survey work is underway on the state of the national park’s peatlands – a precious environmental resource because of peat’s unique ability to store carbon in the fight against climate change.
The work has been made possible by the grant from the £50m Nature for Climate Fund which has a target of restoring more than 850,000 acres of peatlands across the UK by 2025.
Rishi welcomed the awarding of the grant and the start of work.
He said: “Upland peat is a very special habitat and it has an amazing ability to hold moisture and carbon with the additional benefits of naturally filtering water and helping to prevent flooding.
“Some great peatland restoration work is already underway in the Yorkshire Dales and I am delighted that thanks to this grant we are seeing the start of work to restore degraded peatlands in the North York Moors.”
The Moors project funded by the grant will survey the condition and depth of peatland throughout the North York Moors.
Dr Briony Fox, Director of Conservation at the North York Moors National Park Authority, said: “The last 200 years has seen significant peat loss from the North York Moors. This is due to a number of reasons including the digging of peat for fuel, agricultural improvement, drainage and wildfires.
“Restoring peatlands will support nature recovery and make a huge contribution to enhancing our resilience to climate change.
“By working with local communities and finding innovative ways of funding this important work, we can support farmers and land managers to deliver sustainable practices and together we can achieve solutions that benefit both nature and people.”
Dr Fox said the national park was working on the project – called Moor to Restore – with the Palladium Group – as part of a UK-wide collaboration between National Parks and Palladium that aims to raise private capital to fund nature restoration.
She added that the long-term aim is that all areas of degraded peat habitat in the park (approximately 11,000 acres) will be actively undergoing restoration within the next decade.
For this ambition to be achieved, the Moor to Restore project would also identify how maintaining healthy peatland can provide land owners and managers with sustainable incomes.
The work that started this month is designed to support the initial planning stages of the project, with the expectation that further funding will be sought for landscape-scale restoration works.
