Next time you visit a garden centre inspect the bags of compost. If they contain peat then don't buy them and ask why they are selling a product that is seriously upsetting the climate.

Peat is made of vegetation remains that accumulate with little oxygen in natural wetland areas, and that's where it should stay, not in big plastic bags in garden sheds or Finland's power stations.

Unfortunately peat has been used for many years on open fires in rural communities, where the hillsides are scarred with the areas peat has been dug from.

In lowland areas it was the custom to drain bogs and wetlands, as in the Norfolk fens and broads. The problem is that when exposed to air peat decomposes with its carbon combining with oxygen to produce CO2.

Peat is the largest and most efficient land-based store of carbon, and ranks second only to the oceans with bogs storing on average ten times more carbon per hectare than any other ecosystem, including forests. This is not surprising as this is the way that coal began to form.

Draining Indonesian bogs to plant oil palms for biofuels is short-sighted as the carbon emissions saved this way are only a fraction of those caused when the bogs dry out, and then often burn. More than 100 Sumatran peat fires that began in 1997 are still smouldering.

The bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America are a vast natural reservoir of organic carbon, holding the equivalent of more than 70 years of global industrial emissions, and there is evidence from the University of Wales that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is encouraging the bogs to give up their own carbon at an increased rate.

The UK has 15 per cent of the world's peat lands and locked in them are 20 years of industrial CO2. It needs to stay there. The good news is that the Environment Agency and others are taking action in the north Pennines to make sure it does.

Up to 120 miles of moorland drains will be blocked with peat dams to stop the flow of water. The ditches will fill and revegetate and reduce the production of CO2 as well as acting as a large sponge, so slowing down flooding.

Thorne and Hatfield moors, near Doncaster, are now protected as they are part of the Humberhead Peatlands National Nature Reserve, though large firms were still mechanically stripping the peat until as late as 2004.

While there are now many non-peat alternatives for mulching and soil improvement, 88 per cent of potting compost still contains peat even though it is not necessary.

The addition of a little sand to sieved home compost, from tea bags, banana skins, grass cuttings and toilet roll cores, will do equally well and has the merit of leaving the peat as it should be - wet, and where it formed.