Abatement of Carbon Emissions - 2023

This layer will help you identify some of the strategic opportunities in your area for positive change and work out plans with land managers to enhance carbon, whatever the current land use. Carbon abatement is the reduction in carbon dioxide presently being released to the atmosphere from the environment when land use and management are in conflict with the best carbon outcome. This layer compliments the carbon sequestration map and shows where different types of actions can be taken to maximise carbon storage and sequestration. The approach here has been to highlight the worst areas of the country for carbon loss and abatement potential. Where existing high quality semi natural habitat already exists there is likely to be opportunities to enhance carbon, but much of this is fine scale management decisions that a national data set cannot determine. So, a more precautionary approach has been applied that if a habitat presently exists on a site, land-use change has not been recommended. There will be places where an existing habitat could be enhanced or changed to another habitat to give carbon benefits. Many habitats have become degraded through management practices over time, such as drainage, which means it now sits in a lower carbon state & is losing carbon and as such has abatement potential such as conversion from a dry grassland habitat with drainage to much wetter fenland habitat. In the worse cases some habitats in our current priority habitat classification system are degraded versions of other habitats and have the potential to move between habitats and so abating carbon. This layer has made a broad assessment of which land use may be changed to an appropriate higher carbon variant. In the case of very productive grassland and pasture we have assumed only a change to high carbon management practices where clear abatement gains are present. This is because high value agricultural land is a key non-renewable resource which is needed for food security. In addition, such land generates a good economic revenue for agricultural goods.

This map was created differently to the others, by using a Python script to run the analysis. Firstly, a table was designed that looked at habitats and possible soil types they could develop upon. This was then used to create a logic table showing areas which were now not on suitable soil types, for example arable land on deep fen peat. Scoring was awarded from scientific review, using expert judgement by the team, and insights in developing the previous layers results, on the potential sequestration enhancement or land use of each type of land management action or change. All the technical information is available in the accompany technical report. The classes used in the abatement maps and models are shown in Table 1 with the Logic tables are found in -Appendix 4 Abatement logic rules in full technical report. Code/ Class / Notes 1/ Maintain - enhance existing habitats / Some of our existing habitats for example, blanket bog vegetation deep peat, are not in the best ecological condition they can be. This is particularly the case for peatlands and heather moorlands which have been drained to change blanket bog vegetation into heathland vegetation or to obtain a grazing value out of the blanket bog. 2/ Low/ On productive agricultural land (intensive grassland and arable) there are possibilities to enhance carbon by changing land management practice. 3/ Low/medium/ This was given where the habitat could be replaced with a more suitable habitats ; 4/ Medium/ This is allocated where changing land use could result in a fairly good enhancement of carbon sequestration. 6/ High /The highest benefits to abatement are restoring the deep peats which are currently under arable and intensive grazing. i.e. the fenlands area 7/ Urban / It was not in scope for this project to look at carbon values in urban areas as the data accuracy is to poor too make an informed decision. 8/ Water / It was not in scope for this project to look at carbon values within water bodies as the data accuracy is too poor to make an informed decision. NE PHI/ Ancient Woodland - OGL NE Living England - OGL NE Peatmap [2008] - Non- comercial licence NE SSSI data NFI-National Forest Inventory (NFI) Forest Reserach- OGL Soilscapes - Cranfield University/ HMSO- NE Bespoke Licence SRTM- NASA ShuttleRadar Topography- Open Topography