Willmott, who first travelled to the islands as a teenage birdwatcher, is working on a peatland strategy with White and others, to support targets set by the council to reach net-zero emissions by 2045. So far, projects on Shetland are restoring just 250 hectares when they need to be restoring ten times that - about 2,500 hectares per year, said Matt Willmott, conservation officer in Shetland for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which has three sites on the island dedicated to peatland restoration. "We should be talking about our peatlands like that."īut as Shetland looks to restore its peatland at scale, experts say sceptical farmers will need to be brought on board. "We talk about 'ancient' woodland, that just makes it sound: whoa, this is really special stuff," she said. People need to be made more aware of the value of these ecosystems that have evolved over thousands of years, she said.
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Shetland has about a dozen machine operators who can work on peatlands, but Peatland ACTION needs 60 to 70 trained workers to reach its targets on the islands, White said. To accelerate the programme, NatureScot said it is investing in training for contractors and scheme designers and introducing multi-year grants for large-scale projects, among other things.
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While significant funding is available for such projects, one of the biggest challenges is getting boots on the ground, which is particularly difficult in these remote islands.Īccording to data from the Office for National Statistics, the islands have 1.12 jobs per person of working age, compared to 0.85 in Britain as a whole. The Peatland ACTION programme, which is run by government agency NatureScot, has set more than 43,000 hectares " on the road to recovery" since 2012.