The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) has made the Flow Country, a vast and unspoiled blanket bog that carpets the far north of Scotland a world heritage site.
The Flow Country- which is the planet’s largest blanket bog- covers about 1,500 sq miles of Caithness and Sutherland, and is the first peatland in the world to be designated by Unesco, after a 40-year campaign by environmentalists.
One of the world’s biggest carbon stores, it joins sites such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Serengeti in Tanzania and the Grand Canyon in the US among the world’s most protected and treasured natural assets.
With peat as deep as 15 metres in places, ecologists had told Unesco the Flow Country was the best example on the planet of a crucial yet threatened ecosystem; it hosts a diverse range of specialist plants and wildlife that have evolved to live on blanket bogs and peatland.
Those plants include bogbean that displays vibrant pink-fringed white flowers in spring, carnivorous sundew, yellow-flowered bog asphodel and dozens of different species of sphagnum moss. It also supports dragonflies and rare bird species such as the dunlin, golden plover and red-throated diver.
Its dense peat, which has accumulated over the past 9,000 years, also stores roughly 400m tonnes of carbon. Meeting in Delhi, Unesco agreed with specialists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that its preservation had even greater significance because of the climate crisis.
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It was “the most extensive and diverse example of an actively accumulating blanket bog landscape found globally”, the IUCN said, following exhaustive surveys.
“Distinctive forms of blanket bog have evolved, exhibiting a diverse mosaic of mire and vegetation types with their associated species assemblages, including the full range of habitats from pools to drier hummock microsites including elements of damaged bog, transitional bog and fen communities.”
Graham Neville, who led the campaign to designate the site on behalf of NatureScot, the government conservation agency, said the decision was “momentous”.
“World heritage site status will lead to greater understanding of the Flow Country and raise the profile of Scotland’s peatlands globally for their value as biodiverse habitats and important carbon sinks,” he said. “It is a wonderful recognition of the expert stewardship of farmers and crofters in maintaining this incredible ecosystem as a natural legacy for future generations.”
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
