The 3% Solution to a 90% Problem

Quick summary

• Restrictions on moorland burning are often defended on climate grounds: burning releases carbon.

• Peer-reviewed research cited to Parliament found peatland wildfires caused around 90% of UK fire-related carbon emissions, 2001–2021.

• Correctly executed burns do not ignite or heat the peat, and are estimated to emit around 3% of a wildfire's emissions.

• Restricting managed burning to protect carbon lets fuel build for the wildfires that actually release it.

The case against burning heather is usually a climate argument. Burning releases carbon; peat is one of Britain's largest carbon stores; therefore fire on peat must be stopped.

It is the reasoning behind the restrictions Defra and Natural England have placed on prescribed burning since 2021.

The carbon figures do not support it. Read the evidence submitted to Parliament's wildfire inquiry and the opposite case emerges: managed fire is not what threatens peatland carbon. It is what keeps that carbon in the ground instead of in the sky.

Where the carbon actually goes

Begin with the figure that should reframe the debate. Peer-reviewed analysis cited by the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) found that peatland wildfires were responsible for around 90% of the UK's total fire-related carbon emissions between 2001 and 2021.

Not 90% of upland emissions, or of moorland emissions. Around nine-tenths of the country's fire-related carbon, from wildfire burning down into dried-out peat.

That is the carbon event that matters. When a summer wildfire reaches degraded, drained peat, it does not stop at the surface. It ignites the peat and smoulders, releasing carbon laid down over centuries that no rewetting programme can restore in a human lifetime.

The 2025 Langdale fire on the North York Moors was recorded in evidence as the largest wildfire in England's history for carbon released, having burned over 25 square kilometres. it was a carbon disaster because the ground burned, not because heather did.

What a managed burn actually does

A controlled winter burn is a different event. It is a low-intensity surface fire, lit on cool, damp ground, that takes off the top growth of heather and goes out.

Peer-reviewed work on soil heating beneath prescribed burns carried out by trained teams found that well-executed management burns "do not burn or significantly heat the peat". The carbon store underneath is left intact.

The emissions follow from that. In its published analysis, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust estimates that a prescribed burn emits roughly 3% of a wildfire's emissions, and that the vegetation regrowing afterwards absorbs carbon, producing a net gain within five to seven years.

A few per cent, against the wildfire it helps prevent, recovered inside a decade.

Nor is there a hidden penalty over the longer cycle. As the CLA set out, there is no conclusive evidence that controlled burning produces net higher carbon emissions than other management across a full rotation once the carbon locked into charcoal is counted (citing Heinemeyer and Ashby, 2023, among others).

The peer-reviewed picture is not "burning bad, everything else good." It is genuinely contested, and on the emissions that reach the atmosphere, prescribed fire is the low-carbon option.

The policy is self-defeating on its own terms

Place the two side by side. A managed burn emits a fraction and leaves the peat unburned.

A wildfire on unmanaged peat is the single largest source of fire-related carbon in the country.

A policy that restricts the first to protect carbon is removing the tool that holds down the fuel for the second.

That is the road policy has taken. Since 2021, Defra's regulations have increased the area of deep peat where burning is restricted from 246,156 hectares to over 676,000 hectares.

The fuel that would have been reduced on that ground does not vanish. It accumulates, dries out in hotter summers, and becomes the fuel for the next wildfire that burns into the peat and releases the carbon the policy was meant to protect.

The disagreement, and the ask

Natural England reaches different conclusions. Its evidence review argues that burning damages peatland carbon, biodiversity and water, and it is the basis for the current restrictions.

That disagreement is real, and it is precisely why the Moorland Association's central request to the Committee is not "trust us" but "publish the evidence." Where a tool as consequential as prescribed burning is restricted, the science behind the restriction should be transparent and open to challenge.

On carbon, the question for the Committee is simple to put. If peatland wildfires cause around 90% of the UK's fire-related emissions, and correctly conducted prescribed burns leave the peat unburned, then a restriction on those burns should be able to show that it lowers emissions rather than raising them.

The Committee should ask Defra and Natural England to produce that accounting — the full-rotation carbon balance of prescribed burning against the wildfire risk it offsets — and to publish it.

The evidence heard by this inquiry points one way. Policy has so far gone the other, and it should have to show its workings.