Dr Rosie Everett is a specialist in peatland restoration with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches to support community-level restoration. She is a member of the United Nations Environment Programme Global Peatlands Initiative.
In October, she started a ClimateXChange research project with Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC). She is examining the supply, suitability and sustainability of alternatives to peat for use in Scottish horticulture. In this role, she works directly with Scottish Government policymakers.
In a recent podcast interview, we chatted about her role and how peatlands, a type of wetlands very prominent in Scotland, are relevant to climate change. This blog post presents a summary of some of that discussion.
What is the relevance of peatlands to climate change?
Over the past 20 years, there’s been a real acknowledgement of the role of peatlands – big wet organic systems that hold lots of plants and animals. Peatlands hold carbon and they also help support different ecosystems in wetland environments.
About 20% of Scotland is covered in either peat soils or deeper peats. However, about 80% of Scotland’s peatlands are in poor condition.
People have been using peatlands as a resource for hundreds of years, such as to produce whisky, for fuel and horticulture. Since the 1930s it’s been used as a key component across the horticultural industry for growing different crops, throughout the process all the way from seedlings to full trees.
This relates to climate change because peatlands have a huge potential for holding carbon dioxide. They’re a huge carbon sink – they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through processes to do with the breakdown of the material that forms peat. This also releases carbon dioxide, but a healthy system has a net balance. Peatlands have the potential to hold around three times more carbon than forests or woodlands. They’re a real opportunity to help tackle some of the challenges that we have in Scotland with greenhouse gas emissions.
However, given that they are in poor condition, they’ve now become a net source of carbon dioxide. They are drying out from cutting and from some of the erosional processes that are associated with changing climates such as increased heat. With increased rainfall, there is further risk of erosion.
We’re in this loop where peat in Scotland supports different industries, but actually we’re responsible for the deterioration of peatlands. They’re being made worse as the climate changes while they should be acting as a source of support for overcoming issues related to global warming. We’re in a real wicked problem circle of how to deal with them in Scotland.
What attracted you to this postdoctoral research project with ClimateXChange on transitioning to peat free horticulture in Scotland?
The Scottish Government has made the commitment under the National Planning Framework and in their climate change policies to protect Scotland’s peatlands, whether that is restoration, preservation, or conservation.
The fellowship is an interesting project because it really takes to heart some of the key challenges that we have from a peatland perspective. It’s a real balance of protecting an economic sector within Scotland while tackling climate change.
For example, the horticultural industry provides about 60,000 jobs directly and indirectly and is also estimated to be worth about 2.6 billion to the Scottish economy. Scottish Government has the challenge of balancing that need to protect jobs and that industry, but also protect peatlands.
So much work has already been done in the academic sector about what alternatives to peat can be used within the horticultural industry. This project brings that into focus to enable the Scottish Government to review the options to go completely peat free and how we can support the horticulture industry in making that step forward.
Has anything surprised you about the policy context for peatlands in Scotland since you started?
The most surprising thing for me working in this fellowship is the challenge that the Scottish Government has in bringing all of the evidence together and finding the best way forward. There’s a lot of research and opinions out there. There are different lobbyist sectors who are working in the peat-free environment to support that transition; and there are groups who are slightly hesitant in moving forward. Trying to balance everybody’s needs and finding the right way forward is a real challenge for the Scottish Government. I empathise with trying to come up with the final approach for this.
What’s it like as a researcher working directly with the Scottish government policymakers?
It’s been a fantastic experience. It’s been a real eye opener for me because I’m so used to writing as an academic researcher. It’s been a really good learning curve trying to work out how to disseminate evidence in language that is appropriate and readable for everybody. It brings all of the nuances of working with different evidence, trying to balance all of the different needs to ensure that we remain objective in the reporting.
What are you hoping to achieve by the end of the project, both personally for you, professionally and practically in terms of project aims?
For me personally, I would really like to have a better understanding of how the Scottish Government pull all this evidence together and the processes that allow them to do it.
From a project perspective, it would be really great to produce a report that helps everybody in the horticulture industry understand the best ways forward for going peat free; how current research supports that; identify knowledge and industry gaps that can be supported through different mechanisms around getting everybody onto the same kind of peat-free process.
ClimateXChange podcast
This is an amended extract from episode 8 of our podcast: Evidence for climate policy in Scotland