Soils are incredibly important. They support approximately 95% of our food production, regulate water cycles, and are a crucial carbon reservoir.
In fact, soils are the largest terrestrial sink of carbon, with a specific type of soil, peat, being the best carbon store of all the soil types.

Peatlands, areas of land predominantly consisting of peat soil, store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests, but only cover about 3% of our world’s land. Healthy peatlands capture CO2 from the atmosphere through their vegetation completing photosynthesis. However, what makes peat soils and wetland habitats in general different, is they are highly waterlogged. Because of this, the plants don’t fully decompose, meaning they don’t release carbon that would otherwise be emitted back into the atmosphere as CO2.

In the UK alone, peatlands store approximately 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon. However, if peatlands dry out, through activities such as draining of the landscape for agriculture, or through extreme weather events like drought, the soil is no longer waterlogged and the vegetation will quickly begin to decompose, meaning these once incredible carbon stores become major carbon emitters.

In the UK, around 80% of UK peatland has been affected due to human activities. This degradation has resulted in net greenhouse gas emissions of around 20 million tonnes of CO2 each year. By rewetting our peatlands, we would be able to turn these soils back into carbon stores, and majorly reduce our carbon emissions.

How can we do this? The main way to rewet a peatland is to block existing drainage ditches, ensuring more water remains on site. Or, we could employ natures little helpers to do this for us. Beavers! Staffordshire Wildlife Trust is in the process of preparing to relocate beavers to one of our reserves, Craddock’s Moss, a lowland raised bog which, due to tree planting, almost completely dried out.

Due to the presence of deep peat pools on the site, land management, such as scrub clearing, can be a challenge, for humans at least. Beavers are natural dam builders, and can help raise the water table across the site. They also love to munch on small shrubs like bramble, helping remove scrub, further increasing water retention.

Studies have demonstrated that the sediments in beaver ponds and the vegetation in the surrounding landscape both help pull and store carbon from the atmosphere, with suggestions that beaver landscapes may remove up to 470,000 tonnes of carbon annually. As natural engineers, beavers remind us that restoration doesn’t always require human hands - sometimes, it just needs us to make space for nature to do what it does best. Let’s give these remarkable animals the room they need to keep rebuilding the world - one dam at a time.