Friday, 23rd May 2008
The medicine is worse than the cure on climate change
The climate change debate has again been thrust right to the top of the political agenda in Scotland with the decision by the Scottish Government to refuse planning approval for the giant windfarm on the Isle of Lewis. I believe this was a courageous decision and was taken in the best interests of sustainability. The unique Lewis peatlands would have been devastated by the construction of 181 giant turbines and 88 miles of roads proposed by the developers for the moors of northern Lewis. Not only would the scheme have had significant adverse impacts on rare and endangered birds living on the peatlands, but the construction work would also have disrupted the hydrology of the peat bog, releasing thousands of tone of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Peatlands form a crucial part of the world’s air conditioning system. They are Europe's rain forests! Peatlands and wetland ecosystems accumulate plant material under saturated conditions to form layers of peat soil up to 20 metres thick – storing on average 10 times more carbon per hectare than other ecosystems. Peatlands occur in 180 countries and cover 400 million hectares or 3% of the world’s surface. Scotland has a unique role to play in preserving and maintaining this global resource. Over one sixth of the world’s blanket bog is located in Scotland, despite the fact that we have only one sixtieth of the world’s total landmass.
Of course those who supported the Lewis project are jumping up and down in fury. They deny that constructing windfarms on peatland releases CO2 and negates any long-term benefits from wind energy. They cite 'scientific evidence' which proves that 'sensible precautions' by windfarm developers, such as 'floating roads', can apparently minimise carbon losses from our unique peat bogs. They also claim that the Lewis peatlands are, in any case, no longer a carbon sink and are now moving towards a "dry heath trajectory" as a degraded peat bog.
We are all familiar with such comments, which are usually uttered by ‘experts’ employed by the power companies. We hear the same bogus story at countless public inquiries and in support of countless planning applications for windfarms in wholly inappropriate locations. The so-called experts talk about ‘floating roads’ as if they have invented a way of defying gravity. The fact is that peat has fewer solids than milk or jellyfish, becoming a major engineering challenge for stability. To construct a floating road across a peat bog requires huge volumes of stone and hardcore as a foundation. But this stone causes damage to the upper layer of peat, thereby impacting on its hydrology. You can imagine the damage that 88 miles of floating roads would have caused in Lewis?
Turbines, foundations, pipelines and access roads all impact on the hydrology of the peat and the hydrology is fundamental to carbon sequestration. If you lower water-logging you alter the carbon cycle. Almost all water which moves across peatlands is in the top 9 or 10 cm. Beneath this level, the peat is saturated and stagnant and is a natural carbon sump. Unsaturated peat, on the other hand, is able to decompose and release CO2. Extensive infrastructure will dry out vast areas of peatland. Dry peat means more carbon loss. Hidden erosion happens deep underground eroding away older carbon stored thousands of years ago. A small feature can thus have a large impact. It may take many years for that impact to develop obvious signs and by then the damage is irreversible.
Drains divert water as well. Water naturally flows from distant parts of a hill to lower peatlands. If you dissect the flow of water with a ‘floating’ road or track, you affect everything down-slope of this new obstacle. Therefore, the problem extends to cover much wider areas across many hundreds of metres (over 500m in most cases).
The claim that the Lewis peatland is somehow ‘degraded’ or dying is also a myth. Although the Lewis Environmental Impact Assessment stated that the peat bog was “moving towards a dry-heath trajectory”, i.e. that it was moving from active peat bog to dry heath, in fact recent aerial imagery of the bog revealed a more complex story. Individual areas of re-vegetation can be found on these images. They suggest that the majority of degraded, eroded peatland has begun to regenerate over the last 60 years. This is typical of peatland which is constantly in a state of flux. Re-colonisation of natural gullies means that peat is re-growing. Mixed wet vegetation can sequester carbon at up to 36 tons carbon per Km2 per year, so the Lewis peat bog is acting as a valuable part of our global air conditioning system and should never be tampered with. The same goes for all peatland.
We all know that carbon is the enemy and reducing carbon emissions is the main task confronting the world. Nevertheless we have to take care that the policies we pursue are sustainable. Constructing windfarms on peatland is not sustainable. It was a disastrous mistake to approve the vast Gordonbush windfarm on deep peatland in Sutherland. Similarly, the Edinbane windfarm in Skye will also destroy a pristine peat bog. Other outstanding applications such as Dava Moor in Grantown on Spey and Kergord in Shetland should be refused permission on similar grounds to the Isle of Lewis project.
There are currently some 980 wind farm proposals across the UK. Of these, 187 are associated with peat, mostly in Scotland. The majority of refusals of windfarm projects have been in England. Apart from the Lewis windfarm, there have been relatively few refusals in Scotland. We are rushing headlong towards catastrophe, destroying a unique resource that stores ten times more carbon than any other ecosystem in the world.
Recently I visited Iberdrola’s wind farm at Maranchon in Spain where they have 104 giant turbines producing 2.5 mw each. The Windfarm has been built on hard rock in a remote part of central Spain. The tiny village of Maranchon (pop. 350) has benefited from around 30 jobs in the project. There has been no impact on agriculture or wildlife and the area is not significant for tourism, so landscape impact has not been a factor. This is the ideal site for an on-shore Windfarm. However, in Scotland, Alex Salmond seems determined to achieve his target of 40% of energy from renewables, leading to a headlong rush to develop windfarms, many of them in wholly inappropriate locations, such as on our unique peat bogs.
