Broads Discovery Grant Award
Exciting news! Exo Environmental have been awarded, alongside our partners, to work on the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and Natural England’s Nature for Climate Peatland Grant Scheme (NCPGS). This project, tendered by the Broads Authority, involves the monitoring of 13 different sites within the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads, with the aim of producing monitoring and restoration plans for peat restoration at suitable sites with the potential for re-wetting and wetland habitat formation. The overall aim is to create environmental conditions suitable for long-term peat formation and thus carbon sequestration from the atmosphere to help combat climate change.
This sequestration is vitally important to keep carbon levels in the atmosphere below a tipping point. The Broads acts a nationally important carbon store, however over past 40 years one million tonnes of carbon has been lost from the Broads due to agricultural draining of deep peatland.
The project involves a partnership of 16 farmers and land managers led by the Broads Authority, including, RSPB, National Trust and Natural England among others. It is hoped that this collaborative approach to active peatland restoration and management will halt the decline in peatland seen across the Broads and nationally and reduce the loss of carbon to the atmosphere.
The project will encourage local farmers and land managers to embrace practices such as palaudiculture (wet farming) and other conservation agricultural techniques which can attract private investment in the form of carbon credits as part of Revere and become sustainable and economically productive.
Through these practices the NCPGS aims to decrease emissions from peatland by 9 megatons of CO2 equivalents (cumulatively) by 2050, and establish the process of restoring 35,000 hectares of degraded peat in England by 2025.
Through this action the restoration of peatland will not only act as a carbon sink but also as natural flood defences by slowing the river flow and providing a unique habitat, increasing biodiversity.
Exo are very excited to be a part of this project and to contribute to the final outcomes which will feed into the Defra Lowland Peat Agricultural Task Force recommendations to Government in summer 2022, which acts as a guideline for future restorative peat land and wetland techniques.
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