Peatlands and Payments

• The Scottish Government are committed to restoring 250,000 hectares of peatland by 2030, in order to meet the ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions, set out in the 2020 Climate Change Plan Update. In order to maximise the emissions reductions and associated co-benefits achieved as a result of peatland restoration, the Scottish Government are currently working with partners to consider the optimal mix of peatland types for restoration.​
• Related to that work, the Scottish Government wish to improve their understanding of the location of different types of degraded peatland in relation to agricultural practices and agricultural support payments. This information will allow agriculture and peatland restoration policy decision makers to make more informed choices about the preferred areas for targeting peatland restoration offers.​
• The purpose of this project is to contribute to the evidence base on which policy decisions will be made by Ministers and supported by the Natural Resources Division and the Agriculture Policy Division.​
• See the Full Report ( Phase 1 ,  Phase 2 ) for additional details.

• Geographical Information System
  • Combines peatland extent and classification maps (100m grids) with business extent maps.
  • Derives per field peatland type mix (areas).
  • Calculates peatland type mix for the area beyond the SIACS fields. This is reported as a single line in the outputs to allow comparison between the peatland areas receiving agricultural or agri-environmental support and those not.
• Database
  • Calculates peatland type mix per claimed land use (including exclusions) – derived from the peatland type mix per field and the proportions of the field per claim.
  • Derives peatland type mix per business grouping claims.
  • Calculates the peatland mix for land that is mapped (i.e., inside SIACS businesses) but unclaimed. This land is reported as single (Mapped but Unclaimed) line in the outputs. This occurs for both Permanently held land and Common Grazings but is much more prevalent in the latter.
• Data Integration and Processing Caveats
  • Each SIACS field can contain multiple land use claims and/or multiple peatland types – the relationship between land use claim and peatland type mix within fields is unknown so each claim is assigned a share of the area of peatland types present in the field.
• See the  caveats  and the Full Report ( Phase 1 ,  Phase 2 ) for additional caveats on this analysis.

The Results of the Analysis are summarised in the table above, with the key numbers for further analysis being the count of businesses with >1000 ha of peat (321) and the area of each Peat class by the Business peat exposure. The 321 businesses identified are key for further analysis, as they may allow a large amount of restoration of degraded peatlands quickly.

Overall, this is a complex analysis that brings together many elements – there are both data quality and data integration issues that limit how the data can be used and remaining uncertainty. Key issues are set out below but see also the Full Report which is linked below.

• Coverage Space – the analysis is for businesses submitting a SAF form – these are all the businesses that interact with farm payment systems – 5.7M ha of 7.8M ha total area.
• Coverage Time – this is a snapshot for 2019 for the SIACS data in terms of use/management but payments for some elements of Pillar 2 are averages over the 2015-19 period. The peatland restoration data was only available to the Hutton team for 2020 onwards and only spatial data with no attribution or payments attached.
• Reliability – all datasets are the best known at the time of analysis. The dataset with most potential issues is the peatland mapping.
• Peatland area - there is confidence that the map is not excluding deep peats (>50cm).
• Peatland condition – the woodland type was updated using NFI (2019) but there remains a small area of woodlands in the peatland mapping not confirmed by NFI. There would need to be further analysis to determine a peatland type for this area. There are questions over the area of the cropping/extensive/intensive grassland categories.
• Granularity
  • Fully spatial – e.g., peat extent mapping and LCA are the most flexible datasets but have uncertainty and minimum mapping units that can mean they miss details at field scale.
  • Field - The link by Hutton of IACS claims/payments data to field maps is imperfect, and ~120k ha are missing and this is being followed up with RPID/LPIS collages (and is likely a synchronisation issue between spatial and non-spatial elements).
  • Field - Within-field features are unmapped in the Hutton data – e.g., land uses or exclusions – this means uncertainty in making field to fully spatial data linkages.
  • Field - Multiple users per field are unmapped – unless a metric can meaningfully be averaged between users over the field (e.g., £ payments) then some metrics cannot be mapped at field or business or always unambiguously linked to fully spatial data (e.g., tenure).
  • Field - Small areas recorded per field (e.g., small ha of BPS claim in otherwise unclaimed field) when mapped using the whole field area this can give the misleading impression (e.g., of large areas being paid at higher rates).
  • Holding – Some businesses are made up of two or more component land holdings (i.e., entities recorded as Agricultural Holdings for the JAC). These can be separated in space across Scotland or be clustered in a single locality. This granularity can be a key scale at which to assess the impacts of land management decisions such as peatland restoration as it links more closely to enterprises and specific combinations of livestock and grazing lands. The JAC and related data are collected at this level and farm type/region classifications are also available. Linkage to farm payments can though only occur at the business level without assumptions on disaggregation having to be made. Holding level analysis was out of scope.
  • Business is the key level linking to the payment regime. The livestock and other activity data used here (with the exception of BPS activity markers) are an aggregate of holdings that may be contiguous or widely space across Scotland. This means the need for care in making inferences for businesses that draw on the mix and location of enterprises.

• This work funded by Scottish Government.
• For additional information contact Keith Matthews:  keith.matthews@hutton.ac.uk 
• See here for the Full Reports:  Phase 1 ,  Phase 2 .
• Additional Analysis of CAP 2014-2019 is available  here. 
• Other related analyses available from the Land Systems Team website  here. 
• Further research in the RESAS Strategic Research Programme 2022-27, in the  Land Use  (JHI-C3-1) and  Land Reform  (E3) Topics and others across the SRP Themes.