1. Key points

As stated in the Peatland ACTION five year partnership plan 2025 – 2030, Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS) will develop regular official statistics on Scotland’s peatlands, which would aim to provide a comprehensive, up-to-date source of basic information on peatlands in Scotland in a single place. This will include information on peatland extent, condition and restoration across Scotland.

The purpose of this document is to explain our initial plans for developing official statistics on Scotland’s peatlands and to invite users to share their views. These statistics will be developed incrementally, and we will prioritise topics of greatest value to users – we won’t be able to include all topics in this document in the first edition of the statistics. We will adapt these initial plans in response to user feedback.

This document targets a general audience and explains what these development plans are, and why they are being proposed. For ease of communication, we have deliberately left out technical details which describe exactly how these statistics will be produced.

This document includes some figures to help provide context. However, we are not labelling any figures in this document as official statistics at this stage.

Your views are important to us.

We highly value feedback on our development plans and we would be very grateful if readers could complete this short questionnaire, which is open until Friday 26 June 2026, or to provide any general feedback or queries to environmentanalysis@gov.scot.