Our new petition

We’re working with the South and West Wales Wildlife Trust and Friends of the Earth Cymru to promote a petition asking for a Senedd debate on stopping future development on peatlands, whether or not they are designated as SSSIs.   Our Secretary, Lorna, explains why this is so important in an interview with the Hands Off Wales podcast, here.

You can read the petition in full, and if you agree sign it, here.

Background

The Cambrian Mountains Society has campaigned for proper management of our uplands’ extensive and vital areas of peatland to be introduced for many years.

Unfortunately, other than sporadic localised projects to re-wet small areas of peat, little has yet been done either in the Cambrians or anywhere else.  The Senedd announced a ban on extraction of peat for garden compost in 2022 but did not actually make any regulations to enforce the ban.

What’s happening now?

Today, over 36% of all Wales’ peatland is now being targetted for development of renewable power stations and the associated infrastructure.  If there is one thing worse than doing nothing to combat climate change, that thing has got to be wilfully digging up large areas of globally scarce peat and consigning it to dry off and die, emitting all the carbon it has stored over millennia as it does so.

So we were dismayed to learn, when we wrote to the new Ministers to ask about their policy on renewable power stations in the uplands, that the Government seemed to believe that peatlands are already protected as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. In fact, only 50% of them are part of any SSSI.  The remainder of Wales’ peatland has no formal protection at all.

Further, under current planning policy even SSSIs are not entirely safe.  Some Planning Inspectors consider that the climate emergency qualifies as a ‘wholly exceptional circumstance’ justifying the destruction of SSSIs (with the catastrophic impact that is likely to have on Wales’ resilience to the Nature Emergency).

No wonder the developers are having a field day!  Of course, they’ll always promise to do no damage to the peat, transferring it to borrow pits where they’ll keep it safe and reinstate it when the project is over.  But experience hasn’t borne those promises out – as these piles of dry peat from the Mynydd y Gwair development north of Swansea graphically show.