Graze Expectations – how Knepp’s animals capture carbon

This is a really important thing to consider.

add to the mix isn't it for rewilding so you know we we're now beginning to stack up the carbon amounts that are in the soil we're doing work on that separately at net you've done all the work on the carbon storage in the scrub we know already from the woodland carbon code we can measure the carbon stored in the mature trees the veteran trees we have here And now we've also got the wetlands increasing by the minute because of our beavers.

We know they're huge carbon sinks in themselves.

So we can add up all the carbon that a rewilding project is storing.

And that is important, isn't it? Because so far...

rewilding has been recognised for biodiversity.

So here in the rewilding project in the southern block with the scrubland, we've had a 400% uplift in biodiversity because of the scrub habitat.

So now we're showing that this scrubland is doing both.

It's doing biodiversity and it's storing carbon.

And that's going to change the future of how places like this are funded.

Because what you're creating is a unit that's not just great for carbon storage, it's charismatic carbon, it's storing carbon and it's brilliant for biodiversity.

So up until this point, the kind of gravy train, as it were, for kind of carbon credits, for measuring carbon and investing in carbon, has been tree planting, very much based on the plantation model.

And that can go very badly wrong, can't it? Because you're driven to plant trees in a particular way that isn't encouraging for wildlife.

In worst-case scenarios, where you're planting Sitka spruce in the flow country in Caithness and Sutherland, you're actually releasing carbon from the peat storage where they're planted into the atmosphere.

So you're creating huge environmental damage, but you're also releasing carbon.

So just planting trees isn't the answer to getting carbon out of the atmosphere.

But if you can do something that is storing carbon and is good for the environment and good for biodiversity, that's a win-win situation.

And that's what we should be encouraging the funding to going towards.

And having animals present in that landscape, because what this research is showing is that when you've got browsing present, you are creating a bigger carbon pool.

These trees are drawing down more carbon when they're being stimulated by that browsing pressure.

I guess what's exciting about this research and what we can see here at NEP is that we don't need to plant trees to store carbon, that there are other ways using natural regeneration that are almost perhaps even more effective and... more reliable at storing carbon than your classic plantation, which quite often they come in from nurseries and are quite sickly and they die off quite easily.

They kill the soil, so you have these biodiversity sort of dead zones underneath.

I'm kind of thinking about more like the Sitka spruce plantations.

Instead, you can just create a space for a rewilding project and just let woodland grow within thorny patches and have animals browsing on them and you're creating these carbon pools.