100 signatures reached
To: Steve Reed, Secretary for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs; Mary Creagh, Minister for Nature
Stop Burning Our Moors: Protect our kids, not grouse hunts.
We are a group of parents calling for a complete ban on moorland burning in the UK. Landowners burn heather for driven grouse shooting, leading to harmful air pollution, increased flood risk, and increased wildfire risk, all while releasing tonnes of carbon into the air, accelerating climate change. Our children’s health and futures need to be prioritised over a wealthy person’s sport.
Why is this important?
Wealthy landowners are burning our moorlands for grouse shooting on the land. But the toxic smoke from this burning blows over surrounding communities and releases tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. It’s terrible for our health, for the planet, and for animals. It needs to stop.
Burning heather causes harmful air pollution, resulting in spikes in hospital admissions in nearby communities. Notably, the event on the 9th October 2023 in Sheffield, when burning on Moscar Moor caused smoke to blanket the city, raised levels of harmful PM2.5 air pollution to five times the legal limit. The highest levels were recorded at Lowfield Primary School. Children are particularly vulnerable to poor air quality, and those children were exposed to harmful levels of air pollution for hours that day. Our children deserve to breathe clean air.
The peatlands of England are perhaps our biggest carbon store - more than the forests of the UK, Germany, and France combined - yet burning them releases tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. These dry, burnt moorlands also cause rainwater to simply run off them, causing flooding in nearby communities. A healthy, wet moorland with lots of sphagnum moss acts as a natural flood defence, soaking up all the excess water. A wetter moorland also helps stop wildfires from spreading. Landowners argue that controlled burning stops wildfires, but because the land has been drained it is more likely to catch fire.
As parents, we worry so much about the futures of our children, and all children. With the climate crisis in full swing, we are seeing more floods and wildfires every year, yet this incredibly valuable asset on our doorstep is being burnt to a crisp. We need to be doing all we can to protect our kids now and into the future. Our children deserve a liveable climate.
Additionally, the practice of grouse moor management has created a monoculture. Did you know that real healthy moorlands are more than just heather? We should be seeing a much wider variety of plants and animals on our moors, but the land is managed to inflate the population of grouse to the detriment of many other species. Landowners and gamekeepers are accused of killing birds of prey, corvids, and small mammals - anything they see as a threat to the grouse population. Not to mention the poor grouse themselves, who are killed simply for fun.
When you take your kids for a walk through a grouse moor, they won’t see much. They are devoid of life, with few birds or insects. Compared to a walk through a healthy moorland, where they may spend hours foraging bilberries, finding frogspawn, admiring mosses, hunting for minibeasts, and spotting birds like kestrels and stonechats. Our children deserve thriving moorlands to joyfully explore.
They deserve good health and hope for the future. Our children deserve an end to moorland burning.
