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Supported by Visit Britain and Nature Scot, we welcome Andrew McBride and Rebekka Artz as they present their expert knowledge on the topic of Scottish peat.

With strong Government backing, peatland restoration in Scotland has made major progress in the last decade. In his presentation ‘Peatland Restoration in Scotland – Lessons to learn from the peat face’, Andrew considers what we can learn from this experience and with Climate Change impacts increasing, what we can do to respond more quickly in the future.

Peatlands across the UK currently release around 17.6 Mt CO2e per year (2019 data) instead of functioning as the net carbon sinks they could be, if all areas were in good ecological condition. The realisation of the scale of the problem has led to a significant increase in both public and private funding for peatland restoration efforts over the past decade. Investment is expected to ramp up rapidly in this current decade, the global UN Decade on Restoration. In her presentation ‘Optimising peatland restoration to achieve net zero’, Dr Rebekka Artz summarises the state of our knowledge on the emissions reductions that peatland restoration brings, in the short to medium term after management interventions and in terms of the likely stability of such emissions reductions in the light of climate change.