Peatland restoration

Drained peatland does not store carbon; it releases it. The Caithness site had been ditched for forestry in the 1970s, and the drains were still doing their job half a century later, lowering the water table and exposing peat to oxidation across four thousand hectares.

Survey first

Restoration design depends entirely on where the peat is deep, where it is already eroding, and how water currently moves across the site. We ran a peat depth survey on a 100-meter grid with infill at 25 meters in complex areas, combined with an airborne survey to map the drain network — which turned out to be about eighteen percent longer than the historic records showed.

Hydrological modeling then set the dam spacing. Too far apart and the water table stays low between structures; too close and the cost rises with no additional benefit.

The work on the ground

• 61 kilometers of drain blocked with peat dams, with plastic piling used only where peat depth was insufficient
• 140 hectares of erosion gully reprofiled and revegetated
• Self-seeded conifer removal across 380 hectares, felled to waste to retain the carbon on site
• Low-ground-pressure machinery only, with a strict weather window to avoid track damage

Peat dams cost a fraction of engineered structures and fail more gracefully. Where the peat can hold them, they are almost always the right answer.

Verification and monitoring

The project is validated under a recognized peatland carbon standard, with emissions reductions claimed against a documented counterfactual of continued drainage. Units are issued on a verified basis at five-year intervals rather than up front, which is slower and considerably more defensible.

Dipwells across the site show the water table within ten centimeters of the surface for ninety-two percent of readings in the last monitoring year, against fifty-one percent at baseline. Breeding wader surveys have recorded eleven species, including four that were absent at the start of the program.