South West Water has secured £9 million funding to restore peatland that will sequester carbon as part of the company’s work to reach net-zero emissions by 2030.
The company was awarded the money towards the £13 million project as part of Natural England’s Nature for Climate Peatland Restoration scheme to re-establish 2,634 hectares, which will save the equivalent of 652,625 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
As well as sequestering carbon the rewetting project will restore ecosystems to help recovery of biodiversity.
“The projects being awarded funding today will bring about much-needed peatland restoration across the country. We have committed to triple our historic average annual peat restoration figures and these landscape-scale projects will provide a great contribution to achieving this and accessing the wealth of benefits healthy peatlands offer.”
The projects, which will see South West work with farmers and landowners, will also improve the quality and quantity of water leaving the peatlands.
Peatland restoration plays a key role in South West’s commitment to reach carbon net zero by 2030. Its plans will see the company increase its energy efficiency programme including pump optimisation and wastewater treatment processes. It will switch from fossil fuels to lower carbon alternatives as well as purchasing all renewable electricity and moving towards an electrified van and car fleet by the end of the decade.
As well as peatland restoration the company will sequester carbon via a tree planting programme that will see it add 250,000 trees to its region by 2025.
Work is underway to recover energy from wastewater sludge processed at its treatment plants and develop and implement innovative lower carbon solutions.
South West’s peatland projects manager, Morag Angus, said: “The peatlands in the South West of England are very important for water quality, carbon storage, biodiversity, cultural history, recreation and farming but they are the most vulnerable in the UK to the impacts of climate change due to their southerly position.” The funding will enable the projects to continue to increase the region’s resilience to climate change.
According to Ben McCarthy, head of nature conservation and restoration ecology at the National Trust, which is contributing to the scheme, peatlands play a critical role in the global carbon cycle that can lock away twice as much carbon as the world’s forests.
In 2018 the water industry made a sector-wide pledge to reach carbon net zero by 2030 as a public interest commitment. Last year Water UK published a routemap to achieve this goal that set out how 10 million tonnes of emissions will be cut this decade from a 2019 baseline.