Rural Areas: Fire Prevention
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what long-term measures his Department is taking to improve the resilience of rural landscapes to wildfires, particularly in areas and West Dorset.
Answered by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
The Government is delivering the change to land use needed to increase our resilience to the impacts of climate change. This includes restoring the peatlands, wetlands and woodlands that store carbon and reduce wildfire risk to farmland, homes, infrastructure and nature.
Land use and land management changes can reduce the likelihood of severe or sustained wildfire while also delivering wider benefits for biodiversity, carbon storage, water regulation, and the condition and recovery of the habitats and landscapes they are intended to protect. The Land Use Framework, published earlier this year, set out how we are developing policy to incentivise and spatially target land uses with these multiple benefits.
The Nature for Climate Peatland Grant Scheme has supported the restoration of peatlands across 16 sites in Dorset since 2023, including across the Dorset Heaths and mires.
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