Worwin UK Foundation

Protecting our precious peatlands

Healthy peatlands are unique and wonderfully wild places, they provide homes for birds, insects and unusual plants and they store around 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon, (around the same amount as all the forests in the UK, France and Germany!) In the UK we have nearly 3 million hectares of peatlands, including 13% of the world’s blanket bog, a globally rare habitat. 

But 80% of these peatlands are not in a good condition and due to their degraded state, they are releasing millions of tons of CO2 each year. Due to their important role in storing carbon and tackling the climate and nature crisis, Peatlands have been identified as the top priority habitat to be restored by the UK Climate Change Committee.

With support from Worwin UK Foundation, The Wildlife Trusts are restoring the UK’s peatlands and raising public and political awareness about their importance. Funding is helping us to buy, replant and restore large areas of degraded peatlands across the country, protecting them from future harm and connecting them to existing fragments of peatland so that wildlife can thrive. 

We are also working to secure greater legal protection for peatlands and exploring how paludiculture, a wet farming technique, could help to protect peatlands. 

For information on peatlands, their role in climate change and the wildlife which call them home, click here.