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Our National Parks in Wales consist of Snowdonia, the Pembrokeshire Coast and the Brecon Beacons which between them account for:

20% of Wales by area, carbon rich soils, a high proportion of important wildlife areas and designated sites and the source of South Wales' drinking water.

The National Parks include some of Wales' highest and lowest, wettest and driest, warmest and coldest places, which mean that between them they will feel the worst of what climate change brings to Wales.

The effects include: storms, floods, saturated land and heavier rainfall during winters, low river flows, water shortages, drought and erosion during springs, summers and autumns.

The National Parks also include some of Wales' toughest lands to farm in the hills and exposed coastal slopes, where incomes are already marginal, offering little scope to adapt to changes.

Wildlife and agricultural practices

Like elsewhere in England and Wales, most wildlife-rich land in the Parks is within farmed land, whether or not the wildlife habitats there are actively farmed, with exceptions being some National Nature Reserves, wildlife trust reserves and RSPB Wales and Woodland Trust Wales reserves.

Wildlife has already experienced changing fortunes caused by changing agricultural practices and these have led to both declining farm incomes and wildlife in the countryside.

Even within nature reserves, the most useful form of habitat management is often to graze it with cattle, ponies, sheep or a combination of these.

If wildlife exists because of the way the land used to be farmed, the best way to keep it going is to manage it the way farmers used to manage it. This involves using low numbers of hardy livestock, very little or no fertilisers and pesticides and letting nature take care of soil fertility and pest control.

Changing habitats

Habitats like the upland commons of the Black Mountains, Central Beacons and Mynydd Du in the Brecon Beacons include carbon-rich moorlands, where the rolling blanket bogs and wet heaths dominate the landscape.

Where these have enjoyed low grazing pressures and have not been damaged by frequent heather burning or pollution, the heather plants continue to thrive and the peat-forming Sphagnum mosses have continued to soak up rainwater and lay down fresh peat.

Where moorlands have not enjoyed such freedom from the pressures of heavy grazing, frequent fires and industrial pollution - Sphagnum mosses have been suppressed and heather plants have largely disappeared or are very stunted.

The future might not be rosy for any of the bogs and heaths however, whatever their recent history.

Soil carbon emissions

Peat is vulnerable to disturbance, whether by cutting, trampling and erosion, burning or drying out.

Erosion and drying out are significant risks during warmer and drier summers. If peat erodes or dries out, it releases its carbon into the atmosphere, adding to greenhouse gas emissions.

Organic or carbon-rich soils cover about 20% of Wales, containing 50% of the country's soil carbon. 40% of Wales' soil carbon is in upland and grassland soils.

Welsh soil carbon is estimated to amount to 410 million tonnes (of which 164 million tonnes is in the uplands), including at least 126 million tonnes of organic soils including peat (of which 50.4 million tonnes is in the uplands).

In the UK as a whole the soil carbon is estimated to be upwards of 9,800 million tonnes, which is 64 times the volume of annual UK carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, with the largest proportion of this in upland organic soils.

Within National Parks vast tracts of such soils are already severely degraded by erosion, overgrazing, trampling, poor burning management practices and acid rain deposition caused by industrial pollution.

Furthermore, a 1% loss per year of soil carbon would increase net Welsh carbon emissions by 25%.

Where upland moorlands are already severely degraded or where large tracts of eroding peat are exposed, soil carbon is already being washed or evaporated out.

What can be done?

The biggest solutions will come in the form of changing farm and grazing practices in response to market pressure and public policy to prevent the current situation from becoming worse.

More directly, re-establishing the accumulation of eroded peat and growth of new peat and moorland shrubs and grasses could restore the carbon sequestration function of these soils and could therefore be a positive contribution to mitigating climate change.

A healthy upland bog accumulates carbon at around 2.5 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year, which is a significant volume of carbon sequestration to nurture.

Restoration projects

In the Brecon Beacons, two projects are already under way to restore upland bogs where heavy erosion has exposed the bare peat, with dramatic consequences for the landscape and volumes of peat lost.

The first of these is at Waun Fignen Felen above the Dan yr Ogof Showcaves, whilst the second is on the Black Mountains by the Offa's Dyke National Trail, on the Wales-England border.

At both locations it's a case of helicopter flights and light engineering works to slow down the erosive power of surface water, wind and rain and to trap the eroding peat sediments.

This then creates the right conditions for the water to trickle through, leaving its peat silt 'cargo' behind to settle out and provide the substrate for heath-forming plants like cotton grasses and Sphagnum mosses to become established.

In time this will create the right conditions for the heather plants to re-colonise too.

Hydro-electric power

A third project - The Green Valleys, uses an entirely different approach.

By using the simple idea of harnessing the power from the plethora of streams that flow down through farms and villages in the Brecon Beacons National Park.

The surplus hydro-electricity that is generated is then sold into the National Grid, and the revenue generated is re-invested into more hydro-schemes and projects.

These projects provide the farmers and communities with the resilience and resourcefulness needed to cope with climate change.

Liquid gold

Most significantly of all, the free resource that society has spent the past 200 years engineering off the landscape as fast as possible - namely water, will be treated as liquid gold, to be conserved and managed sensibly.

This water flows from the upland moorlands where it is trapped by the bogs and heaths.

If these are in a poor condition, they cannot trap it properly, meaning that it runs off the hills too fast, filling our rivers and floodplains with flood water.

By this time, we cannot do anything useful with but have to live with its damaging consequences.

So if the money earned from the hydro-electricity is invested into upland moorland restoration, everyone will win.

We will have more water to drink and to generate electricity for longer each year, less flood water and better upland wildlife on restored upland moorlands.

Given the scale of the task to restore these huge uplands, the cost involved and the lack of sufficient public money to make it happen, perhaps this sort of project is where Wales' climate changed habitat fortune lies.

Paul Sinnadurai - who is also the Senior Ecologist and Policy Advisor for the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority