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Local Authorities and Sustainable Peatland Management: Current Opportunities and Future Possibilities for Local Approaches
Charitable sector
The National Heritage Lottery in conjunction with Welsh Government is one of the key funders with respect to grants for landscapes, parks and nature. This currently includes grants to support Local Places for Nature and woodland schemes. These sorts of funds have been used to support SPM with an emphasis on community engagement with the heritage of these areas. The Lost Peatlands project demonstrates the way the multiple benefits of peatlands can be highlighted to access funds from the National Heritage Lottery fund. The Lost Peatlands project is financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund and developed through a partnership of Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council and Rhondda Cynon Taff Borough Council along with NRW, Coed Cymru and Swansea University. The aim is to identify the natural and cultural heritage values of the peatlands and to engage local communities with this heritage. This involves outreach work including engagement with schools, volunteer activities and training events. The aim is also to provide community accessible sites at the peri-urban edge of communities, that act as gateway or stepping- stone into the wider landscape and upland areas. In addition to the community engagement work the project has a programme of habitat restoration works, including peatland restoration. This builds on restoration work that is also being carried out further to funding from a s106 agreement agreed as part of the planning permission process for the Pen-Y-Cymoedd windfarm on the site. This project benefited from a clear steer from the Heritage Lottery Fund that projects supporting the heritage of Neath Port Talbot and Rhondda Cynon Taff were a priority. That said, the way in which this partnership approach has been developed to support the multiple benefits of peatlands to local communities has much wider significance.
Private funding
The IUCN peatlands programme estimates that restoration works on peatlands in the UK (not including maintenance) will cost £500 million between 2018 and 2028. There are many different funding streams to support this, but it is also predicted that government and third sector funding alone will not be sufficient. As a result, much attention has been paid to private funding initiatives supported by the Peatland Code. This provides a standard for UK peatland projects that can be used to verify the climate benefits of those restoration projects. At the time of writing there were four Peatland Code sites in Wales and a further four under development. There are some problems with these systems. Carbon offsetting, is now fairly well established but has been subject to a number of criticisms. There are practical difficulties in establishing verifiable carbon credits whilst such schemes can discourage the prevention of
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