Plant Trees, Save the Earth

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The british isles used to be covered in forests, but after centuries of converting forest land to agriculture, the iconic british woodland was largely a thing of the past by the twentieth century. Back in the 19 eighties, the government started using tax brakes to encourage private citizens to fund tree planting efforts around the country. The goal was to boost the uks timber supply. But when we do plant trees, we need to be really careful about where we're planting them and what happens after they go in the ground.

A few years back, 99pi producer Emmett FitzGerald brought us a beautiful story about peat bogs. Peat is essential for biodiversity and for the climate – it is really, really good at storing carbon. But like a lot of things we cover on the show, peat often goes unnoticed, in part because it is literally out of sight underground. We’ve noticed peat and carbon sequestration more and more in the news lately. Journalists have been brilliantly covering stories about the tree planting movement, private ownership of Scotland’s bogs, and the threat to peat in the Congo Basin. Couple that with more extreme weather happening in more places, we thought it would be a good idea to repeat this story.

For the Love of Peat