ABSTRACT
All of the UK's main wetland types - wet meadows (freshwater and saline marshes); estuarine wetlands and saltmarshes; upland blanket bog and lowland raised bog - have suffered considerable losses during the twentieth century, due to a combination ofboth market and intervention failures. Ithas been claimed that, in aggregate, the UK has been losing some 150000 acres of wetlands a year, due solely to agricultural drainage and agricultural land-use intensification. This estimate was probably accurate until at least the 1970s and early 1980s on the mainland, and as recently as the late 1980s in Northern Ireland. Both wet meadows and saline coastal marshes, in particular, have suffered. Table 3.1 illustrates the scale of these losses for four important coastal grazing marsh areas since the 1930s.
