Mire

• The Scottish government estimates that the carbon stored in its peatlands is equivalent to 120 years’ worth of the country’s emissions.
• The Scottish government has pledged to spend £250 million between 2020 and 2030 to restore 25,000 hectares of peatland a year.

• One manager at NatureScot, the government agency responsible for the environment, described the shortfall as a “national emergency” caused primarily by a “funding gap”.
• He argued that for Scotland to meet its net-zero commitments, there must be large injections of private finance into peatland restoration.

Crofters and carbon markets

• The selling of carbon credits is supposed to direct private investment into peatland restoration.
• With these credits, the buyer, whether a company or individual, can claim to have offset their own carbon footprint.
• Accreditation allows landowners to sell carbon credits on the UK land carbon registry.

Our research team travelled to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides (an island chain off the Scottish west coast) in early 2023 to interview crofters and landowners. We found that confusion over the rights, responsibilities and benefits of selling carbon credits is slowing down restoration, not a lack of funding.

‘Pots of gold’

• The Outer Hebrides has the lowest average income in the UK and the highest rate of fuel poverty in Scotland.
• For crofters here, the prospect of monetary compensation for restoring peatlands (where 70% of the land is classified as peatland soil) is appealing.
• While these brokers made out the process was simple (“restore peatlands, sell the credits to us”) the reality is more complicated.

Muddy legal waters

• These (smaller) “pots of gold” are difficult for crofters to access due to legal complications.
• Our research with Lewisian crofters has shown that unresolved questions regarding profitability and legal complications have created a stalemate.
• Further advice and legal guidance for crofters – from the Peatland Code, Scottish government and the Scottish Land Court – is urgently needed to break the deadlock.

Ewan Gordon Jenkins received funding from STAIRS, the St Andrews Interdisciplinary Research Support fund.

This article was drafted in collaboration with Dr. Cornelia Helmcke (https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/persons/cornelia-helmcke) and Dr. Lydia Cole (https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/geography-sustainable-development/people/lesc1) who were both co-leads on the research team.

• This article is part of La Conversation Canada’s series The boreal forest: A thousand secrets, a thousand dangers La Conversation Canada invites you to take a virtual walk in the heart of the boreal forest.
• It also avoids stoking the pervasive negative perceptions regarding wildfire, which in the boreal is an essential agent of forest renewal and health.
• As a team of scientists who have dedicated our careers to understanding changing boreal fire regimes, we decided to find out for ourselves.

Unusual fire behaviour

• Fire behaviour refers to the way a fire burns.
• This seemingly unusual fire behaviour was previously of limited concern as overwintering fires are hard to detect and, we think, were relatively infrequent.

Remote fire study

• Last summer, our team visited sites in the southern Northwest Territories that had ignited in 2014, experienced overwintering fire, and reignited in 2015.
• These were paired with neighbouring sites from the same 2014 fire that had experienced only a single season fire.
• All potential sites were incredibly remote and could only be accessed by helicopter — our team was able to use one that was on standby for fire duty as it was a relatively quiet fire season.

Carbon emissions

• The most socially relevant concern relates to carbon emissions and potential feedbacks to climate warming.
• Boreal peatlands are thought to store as much as 30 per cent of the Earth’s terrestrial carbon stocks.
• As such, threats to these regions have the potential to compound already rapid increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that underlie global warming.

Failure to renew

• We expect that zombie fires will lead more commonly to regeneration failure — conversion of forest to non-forest — for three main reasons.
• Changes in forest type or failure for forests to recover affects wildlife habitat availability among other impacts, an issue of increasing concern, particularly in the context of declining caribou populations across North America.

Remote sensing advances

• However, advances in space-borne remote sensing have allowed the detection of early spring reignitions, which when combined with information on fire perimeters from the previous year, support accurate detection and mapping of overwintering fires that reignite.
• It will also lead to important insights into carbon losses from this fascinating — although poorly understood — fire behaviour.
• These research grants and contracts support fundamental research on the response of northern high latitude ecosystems to permafrost thaw and wildfire.

• ZUG, Switzerland and LONDON, Feb. 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- UK-based climate technology company ClimaFi announces the first trading platform to offer carbon credits from verified UK peatlands and woodlands.
• CLMT Exchange, a regenerative project built entirely on the Concordium decentralized blockchain, will allow enterprises and organizations to offset their emissions using domestic credits.
• As concerns about climate change grow, many companies are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint.
• The partnership is set to begin immediately, with carbon credits being made available for trading on CLMT Exchange in Q2, 2023.