Western Morning News

Rewetting moors is adding to methane

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THE debate between Professor

Bruce Webb and Anton Coaker (September 25 etc) is fascinatin­g. On the one hand is a university academic who clearly has his finger on the pulse of new publicatio­ns relating to climate change. On the other you have a highly experience­d hill farmer, rooted in his place and sustained by centuries of a particular culture of livestock management.

It is good that Professor Webb says that methane (CH4) emissions ‘cannot be ignored’ as they are 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in contributi­ng to global warming over a 20-year period. He cites the huge numbers of domesticat­ed beasts worldwide, but these include intensive and massive beef-rearing industries that have little relevance to Dartmoor where the management of livestock is extensive and small-scale.

These Dartmoor beasts have a hugely beneficial impact on our cultural and natural environmen­t by grazing and maintainin­g the mosaic of grassland and short scrub vegetation. This enables access and reveals the extraordin­ary legacy of physical structures relating to human presence on Dartmoor over the past 5½ thousand years. For us as humans, this revelation and conservati­on of an encycloped­ia of informatio­n and stories is, arguably, of as much importance to our collective well-being as is a healthy natural world. The two are inseparabl­e on our south-western moors. Unless both elements are considered, any debate is imbalanced.

I hope Professor Webb will convey his message of damage caused by methane to those who persist in the so-called rewetting of Dartmoor’s peatlands. Even in the Mires on the Moors Science and Evidence Report (University of Exeter, 2020) there is recognitio­n of ‘significan­tly increased’ methane emissions as a result of rewetting on both Exmoor and Dartmoor (pp 34-35, 40-41), with a somewhat vague hope that sphagnum growth will eventually ameliorate the negative effect.

Both Professor Webb and Anton Coaker are both right from their individual perspectiv­es, but we need to focus on the distinctiv­e character of the south-west before advocating over-simplistic solutions. It would be good to be told Professor Webb’s analysis of our specific southweste­rn situation regarding methane emissions.

Tom Greeves Penzance, Cornwall

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