By George Monbiot
Last Friday, campaigners in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, issued an urgent warning. The peat bogs on a grouse shooting estate, in the hills that drain into their valley, were on fire. The burning of peatlands, research suggests, is likely to exacerbate floods downstream. Towns in the Calder Valley such as Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd have been flooded repeatedly – partly, local people argue, because the higher parts of the catchment can now hold back very little of the rain that falls on them.
[…]
Last year a paper published in the Journal of Hydrology X reported experiments conducted in the Pennines, the hills in which Calderdale is located. It found that when peat bogs are restored, when deep vegetation is allowed to recover and erosion gullies are blocked, water is held back for longer in the hills and peak flows in the streams draining them are reduced. Broadly speaking, the rougher the surface, the less flooding downstream. Burning moorland for grouse shooting reduces roughness and increases erosion.
[…]
There’s a long and bizarre history here. The fires recorded by the Calder Valley campaigners on Friday were on Walshaw Moor, a 6,500-acre grouse shooting estate that belongs to the well-connected inheritor of a retail empire, Richard Bannister. After he bought it, burning and draining on the moor intensified. Burning and draining raise the abundance of red grouse while reducing the numbers of many other species. Shooting grouse is one of the world’s most exclusive bloodsports: where grouse numbers are high, very rich people pay thousands of pounds a day to kill them.
[…]
Since 2014, when I first wrote about how government policies exacerbate flooding, there has been a growing realisation, in and out of government, that impeding the flow of water off the land, desynchronising flood peaks in the tributaries and slowing a river’s pace can reduce flooding downstream – saving lives, homes and infrastructure. Not every experiment in natural flood management succeeds. The evidence base is still small. More research is needed to discover exactly what works and what doesn’t. But, in some circumstances, ecological restoration can make a major difference, at a fraction of the cost of hard engineering.
[…]