Government investment welcomed as vital step towards restoring degraded landscapes, tackling the climate crisis and protecting wildlife.
The government has announced £25m in new funding to restore England’s damaged peatlands, offering a welcome boost to efforts to tackle the climate and nature crises while helping communities become more resilient to flooding, drought and wildfires.
The investment, announced at the UK’s first wildfire summit, will support a new Peatland Restoration Grant Scheme, administered by Natural England, running from April 2027 until April 2029.
The funding will help restore some of the country’s most degraded landscapes, including upland peatlands previously excluded from recent funding opportunities, while providing much-needed certainty for landowners, conservation organisations and restoration partnerships.
The announcement comes amid concerns that the closure of the existing Nature for Climate Peatland Grant Scheme in 2027 could leave a significant funding gap, threatening years of progress just as interest in restoring degraded landscapes is gathering momentum.
The Wildlife Trusts had warned that without continued government support, restoration partnerships could be forced to abandon plans to restore as much as 10,000 hectares of peatland annually.
Peatlands are among England’s most important natural habitats. Formed over thousands of years, these waterlogged landscapes store vast quantities of carbon, support rare wildlife and play a vital role in maintaining clean water supplies.
Their importance extends far beyond the country’s borders. The UK is home to approximately 13% of the world’s blanket bog, a globally rare habitat, with around a quarter of the UK’s resource found in England. Protecting these landscapes is therefore an important contribution to international biodiversity conservation and efforts to tackle climate change.
Yet centuries of drainage, burning, intensive land management and industrial pollution, compounded by climate change, have left much of the nation’s peatlands degraded, with some releasing greenhouse gases rather than storing carbon.
Restoration involves blocking drainage channels, raising water tables and encouraging the recovery of peat-forming vegetation, particularly sphagnum mosses. Rewetting damaged peatlands can reduce carbon emissions, improve water quality, support threatened wildlife and help landscapes become more resilient to drought and wildfire.
The investment also offers opportunities for rural communities. Across England’s uplands, restoration partnerships have developed specialist expertise, established relationships with landowners and created employment in conservation, ecological monitoring and sustainable land management.
However, the announcement comes amid growing scrutiny of the government’s progress towards its environmental commitments, including its target to restore 40,000 hectares of peatland by 2030.
Earlier this year, the National Audit Office reported that government-funded peatland restoration had fallen short of its original ambitions, despite significant improvements across thousands of hectares.
There is also a compelling economic case for restoring these landscapes. Healthy peatlands provide benefits far beyond their boundaries, from improving drinking water quality and reducing treatment costs to storing carbon and helping communities adapt to increasingly extreme weather.
As England faces growing pressures from flooding, drought and wildfires, restoring the nation’s peatlands is not simply an environmental aspiration, but an investment in the natural infrastructure upon which communities, businesses and wildlife depend.
The £25m commitment is therefore a welcome step. However, with hundreds of thousands of hectares of peatland still requiring restoration, sustained public funding, greater private investment and policies supporting sustainable land management will remain essential.
