The Peak District National Park (PDNP) is a natural treasure enjoyed by 13 million visitors every year. But beneath this beauty lies a growing threat: wildfire.
"Wildfire is inevitable. It’s not if, but when," warned Professor Rob Marrs back in 2019, a sentiment that rings even more true today. This isn't just about scorched earth; it's a peril to the UK's unique landscapes and the vulnerable species that call them home.
This risk assessment of the Peak District moorland uses data to anticipate fire risks, predict their behaviour, and map out pathways for effective mitigation – a method already used to protect major infrastructure and manage flood risks, but now, crucially, applied to our moorlands.
This blog provides a summary of the key points from the risk assessment.
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Why the Increased Risk? The Perfect Storm Brewing on Our Moorlands
Several factors are converging to create a heightened wildfire threat:
Climate Change: We're experiencing increasingly fire-supportive weather conditions with more frequent periods of dry, warm air due to high-pressure systems developing over continental Europe. What used to occur once a year might now happen two to three times, and projections suggest this could increase sixfold by the end of the century.
High Public Access: The Peak District, with an estimated 20 million people living within an hour's drive, is a popular destination. More visitors, unfortunately, increase the chances of accidental ignitions, often linked to activities like barbecues. Visitor numbers saw an astonishing 309% increase in July and August 2020 alone.
Evolution of Land Management Practices: Changes in land management policy have led to a reduction in grazing and controlled burning, resulting in a significant increase in volatile biomass – essentially, more fuel for potential fires.
The numbers speak for themselves. From January to April 2022, England and Wales witnessed 243 wildfires, compared to just 237 for the entire year of 2021. Even marshland, like the Merseyside marshland at Parkgate, can burn, putting property and lives at risk.
What's at Stake? More Than Just the View
Wildfires in the Peak District have far-reaching consequences, impacting:
Biodiversity: The open uplands with their heathland and bog vegetation are the last refuge for nationally threatened wildlife, especially ground-nesting birds. Wildfires often strike during nesting season, jeopardizing the long-term survival of these species. The PDNP is highly designated for wildlife and habitats, forming an essential part of the nature recovery network.
Carbon Storage: UK peatlands, with a significant amount found in the Peak District, store over 3 billion tonnes of carbon – more than the combined forests of Britain and France. Moorland wildfires over peatlands release vast amounts of this stored CO2. The 2018 Saddleworth Moor fire, for instance, led to a loss of around 40,000 tonnes of CO2, an amount that would take 2 million mature trees a year to absorb. Shockingly, recent wildfires have shown that 98% of the carbon lost comes from the underlying peat, not just the surface vegetation.
Water Resources: The Peak District's moorland catchments feed reservoirs that supply around 450 million litres of clean drinking water daily to major cities in northern England. Healthy moorlands naturally filter this water. Wildfires damage this filtering capability and can release harmful chemicals and metals locked in the soil since the industrial revolution.
Flood Prevention: The water-absorbing capacity of healthy moorlands helps protect downstream urban areas from flooding. Wildfire diminishes this crucial ecosystem service.
Economic Costs: The financial implications of wildfires are substantial. Extrapolating from the 2018 Saddleworth Moor fire, conservative estimates indicate costs of £3650 per acre, totalling £8.76 million for the 2,400 acres affected, including carbon loss and the efforts of land managers and the Fire and Rescue Service (FRS). If the entire moorland area in the Peak District burned with similar severity, costs could reach a staggering £478 million.
Social Impact: The Peak District provides vital green space for millions. Closing it due to high wildfire risk is an undesirable scenario. Furthermore, lives and property are at risk when wildfires occur, even on marshland.
A Strategic Approach: Peeling Back the Layers of Wildfire Risk
Recognizing the urgency, a comprehensive regional wildfire risk assessment has been undertaken for the Peak District – the most detailed of its kind in the UK. This project, a collaboration between various stakeholders including Natural England and the Peak District National Park Authority, developed a three-tiered approach to understand and mitigate the threat:
Tier One: Harnessing Local Knowledge: This initial assessment divides the landscape into 1km grid squares. Experienced habitat managers provide their subjective evaluations of factors influencing ignition, combustion (how readily the vegetation burns), and control (how easy it is to put out a fire). This approach taps into invaluable on-the-ground expertise.
Tier Two: Objective Data Analysis: This tier involves analyzing various publicly available and limited-access GIS datasets to objectively assess vulnerability based on the same three key elements: ignition, combustion, and control. Data on visitor pressures, ignition history, fuel type and depth (including peat), accessibility, and water availability are all considered. Importantly, the vulnerabilities identified through this objective analysis strongly correlated with the subjective assessments of Tier One, bolstering the evidence.
Tier Three: Predicting Fire Behaviour: The final tier utilizes global fire monitoring systems, satellite data, remote ground information, and historical data to analyze and forecast potential fire behaviour given the existing fuels. The goal is to understand how fuel, topography, and weather conditions interact. This modelling helps evaluate fire behaviour and the FRS's capacity to intervene, identifying areas where targeted action can improve suppression efforts. The output includes fire behaviour risk heat maps that show the combined rate of spread, flame length, and fire intensity, highlighting potential "fire highways" where fires could rapidly spread. Alarmingly, the data reveals that in certain parts of the landscape, particularly during extreme weather, the FRS currently has little to no chance of controlling a wildfire, regardless of their training and equipment.
This multi-layered assessment provides a clear picture of areas with high ignition risk, potential fire behaviour within different fuel types, and the likelihood of successful fire control.
Building Resilience: A Landscape-Scale Mitigation Strategy
The insights from this comprehensive assessment are the foundation for creating a Landscape Wildfire Management Plan. This plan focuses on four key areas requiring landscape-scale collaboration:
Preventing Ignition: This involves strategies to stop fires from starting in the first place through:
Better reporting of potential hazards.
Improved education and awareness campaigns about the risks and consequences of irresponsible behaviour.
Enhanced communication to inform the public and stakeholders.
Increased physical presence of patrols, strategically deployed to high-risk areas.
Providing designated BBQ sites and potentially banning the local sale of disposable barbecues. The ignition risk maps pinpoint areas where these efforts should be concentrated.
Minimizing the Effects When Fires Ignite: This focuses on breaking the continuity of the fuel load. Fire behaviour is heavily influenced by landscape characteristics, fuel type, and weather. While we can't control the weather, stakeholders can influence the arrangement and continuity of fuels to disrupt potential fire pathways and reduce fire intensity. Key strategies include fuel management techniques like:
Cutting and mowing vegetation.
Grazing.
Promoting vegetation diversification to create less flammable areas.
Cool burning (controlled, low-intensity fires to reduce fuel buildup). Identifying Strategic Management Areas where diverse habitats with reduced fine fuels (like heather, grass, and bilberry, which dry quickly and ignite easily) would have the greatest impact is crucial. Additionally, improving resilience through re-wetting (raising the water table) not only helps protect subsurface peat but can also limit heather growth.
Improving Firefighting Success: Once control opportunities are created through fuel management, the next step is to ensure effective intervention by the FRS. Key factors include:
Improving access to interior moorland areas. Current access routes are often limited to the fringes.
Increasing water availability for firefighting efforts.
Providing improved equipment and specialized training for moorland fires. Currently, the expectations on the FRS to contain extreme fires in these conditions are often unrealistic. Closer collaboration between the FRS and other stakeholders, including incorporating fire risk analysis into land management plans, is essential.
Enhancing Stakeholder Collaboration: A key objective of the project has been to foster collaboration among all relevant parties. This includes landowners, habitat managers, fire services, and policymakers. The project aims to provide a scientific evidence base to enable these groups to work together to find effective solutions, regardless of individual objectives, to protect the landscape as a whole. The next step is to build on this foundation and develop a Landscape Wildfire Management Plan for the Derwent area, identifying the values stakeholders want to protect and informing strategies for ignition reduction, fire behaviour management, and improved fire response.
The Path Forward: Action is Imperative
Wildfire poses a more significant threat than ever before, and our valuable natural assets are increasingly vulnerable. While we can't eliminate ignition entirely, we must act decisively to reduce the risk and mitigate the devastating consequences of wildfires.
The report outlines the next crucial steps:
Further refine the assessment methodology before applying it to the rest of the Peak District.
Develop a Strategic Landscape Management Plan for the Derwent Focus Area, including plans for visitor management, fuel mitigation, and fire response.
This requires leadership and collaboration at all levels. The government's England Peat Action Plan and the Wildfire Framework for England are welcome steps. Now, it's up to stakeholders to work together and implement the necessary changes without delay. The Peak District has the potential to become a Centre for Excellence for wildfire training, analysis, and mitigation strategies, supporting fire services nationwide.
The question is not if wildfires will occur, but how dominant and damaging we will allow future events to become. We must prepare now to protect our natural heritage for generations to come.
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