Grouse shooting moors dominating UK national parks and worsening climate crisis, charity warns

Biodiversity in the UK is being stifled by the environmental toll of driven grouse shooting estates’ intensive management techniques, writes Harry Cockburn

Grouse moor at Bamford Edge in the Peak District (Sam Rose/Rewilding Britain)

More than three-quarters of a million acres of the UK’s national parks are devoted to intensively-managed driven grouse shooting moors which are “contributing to climate breakdown”, new research has revealed.

Ahead of the annual opening of the grouse season on the so-called “glorious twelfth” of August, campaigners have warned these huge tracts of land, totalling an area more than twice the size of Greater London, “keep the land in a degraded state, contribute to climate breakdown, and prevent significant recovery of wildlife”.

The charity, Rewilding Britain, said of the six national parks which contain grouse moors –  found only in Scotland and northern England – almost a third of their combined land area (27 per cent) is devoted to driven grouse shoots.