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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— village December - January
Bogs
– Chairman of COMHAR, the
Sustainability Development Council and Peter
Clinch - now special advisor to the Taoiseach
on economics, were the lead authors of a
report that suggested Irish forestry could
account for almost % of Ireland’s reduc-
tion target for greenhouse gas emissions. Since
then, as other justifications have been steadily
undermined, the argument for % grants
for forestry planting with year subsidies
– all tax free - has increasingly relied on this
‘sequestration’ benefit. At the outset, a clear dis-
tinction must be made between ‘natural forests’
and ‘plantation forestry’. Natural forests are
self-regenerating: as older trees fall, younger
ones spring up in the clearings, absorbing more
greenhouses gases. Soil disturbance is minimal,
preserving the large soil carbon store. Natural
forests are magnificent environmentally. They
are excellent carbon stores.
In Ireland % of our forest cover is indus-
trial plantation forestry, the majority on peat
soils. The use of the land is changed, the soil
drained, and an intensive, often fertilised crop
of trees is planted and harvested in a short time
frame: less than years. Because it disturbs
the soil at the times of planting, road construc-
tion and harvesting, plantation forestry on
these soils is bad for the environment. Irish
forestry policy is currently based on a
document that requires , hectares of
planting until to produce ‘critical mass’
to make a viable pulp or paper industry, a tar-
get repeated in successive Programmes for
Government. But forestry planting figures have
not reached that figure since and have
fallen steadily ever since. Just over , hec-
tares were planted in each of the last two years.
With grants recently cut by %, the figures are
likely to fall further.
An analysis of the forestry industry in
by Peter Bacon – now special advisor to NAMA
- held that ’s ‘critical mass’ would still be
valid if ,-, hectares a year could
be maintained: warning of “serious implica-
tions in terms of the ongoing credibility of the
policy”, if planting rates fell below that. As the
subsequent Malone report noted, “it is self-evi-
dent that if plantings fall below a certain thresh-
old the future growth potential of the industry
will be undermined”. It is against this back-
ground that Clinch and Convery led the charge
to replace the increasingly discredited
policy’s grail of ‘critical mass’ with the value
of trees in mopping up our spiralling green-
house gas emissions. This has led to fig-
ures from the Environmental Planning Agency
(EPA) claiming that % of our required -
carbon reductions will be accounted for
by Ireland’s post- forestry planting. The
problem is Ireland’s conifer plantations on peat
soils are not sequestering carbon as quickly as
they are diminishing our natural sinks – the
peat soils of Ireland. Studies suggest that glo-
bally peatlands may store more than three
times the carbon stored in tropical rainforests.
Forestry that drains and regularly disturbs
large areas of peat soils causes carbon emis-
sions, or at best breaks even. It does nothing
to sequester carbon.
The loss of Irish peatlands over the last
years has been catastrophic. The Irish
Peatland Conservation Council estimated in
that % of our blanket bogs and %
of our raised bogs had been disturbed. The
Parks and Wildlife Service recently reported
to the European Commission that % of
our raised bogs had been destroyed in the ten
years since the Habitats Directive - intended
to protect them - came into force in Ireland in
. The EPA itself ironically published fig-
ures showing that the – loss of car-
bon from Irish soils was million tons, more
than million of them from our peatlands. If
forestry on peat soils is so bad, how much of it
have we planted? The European Environmental
Agency [EEA] caused an uproar when it came
out in with figures that showed % of
“COFORD’s
sequestration
figures are
formulated using
a model that
does not include
the carbon in
the soil at all - a
blatant violation
of the IPCC 2006
Guidelines”
’
Despite official deviousness, peat-planted forestry increases
our carbon emissions
t o n y l o w e s
Ireland’s forestry since (the only for-
estry we can count under Kyoto rules) had been
planted on peat soils – contributing not to car-
bon sequestration but to carbon loss.
How then did the EPA end up claiming car-
bon credits for Irish forestry on peat soils?
Here’s how. COFORD, the research body set up
to serve the Department of Agriculture’s Forest
Service, responded to the EEA’s report by pro-
ducing a document called ‘Dispelling myths:
the true extent of recent peatland afforestation
in Ireland’. That document claimed the
percentage of planting on peat soils in that
period was not % but % - giving %
more of the planting on non-peat soils that
might legitimately be claimed to be storing
carbon. But their figures are based on a mis-
leading definition of peat soils. The EU based
Nitrates Directive defines peat soils as any soil
with more than % organic matter. But the
Forest Service uses a different definition – soils
with peat depth greater than cm, excluding
vast areas of the thinner peat-based soils char-
acteristic of Ireland’s uplands. Next, the esti-
mates of carbon sequestration were compiled
using inflated planting figures. Irish forestry
has been struggling to plant , hectares a
year for the last two years, and yet the
calculations for carbon credits are based on a
planting rate of , hectares per annum up
to , making a further exaggeration of the
claim based on trees that are not being planted.
Then they claim the trees grow better than they
do, and so are capable of taking up more carbon
from the atmosphere than they actually do.
Just as the areas planted on peat soils have
been underestimated, the yield class [YC] – the
measurement of what size a tree will become
and so how much carbon it will absorb – have
been grossly overestimated. A COFORD
report on plantations in the west stated that
“almost one third of the total plantation area
surveyed is only expected to reach a top height
of metres, while a further % may only
reach a top height of metres, before the
risk of windthrow may require it to be clear-
felled”. Data for carbon sequestration is based
on a minimum of metres, the height of a
well grown Sitka spruce plantation at years.
They add an extra years on to the carbon-
absorbing life of tree, suggesting that they will
not be cropped for years when in fact the
average felling age of conifer plantations is less
than years. To top all this off, in what must
be credited as a stroke of genius, COFORD cal-
culates and supplies to the EPA sequestration
figures which are formulated using a model that
does not include the carbon in the soil at all -
a blatant violation of the Intergovernmental
Panel On Climate Change Guidelines.
These Guidelines require reporting of carbon
balances in five areas: – above-ground biomass,
below-ground biomass, deadwood, litter, and
soil.
COFORD’s CARBWARE modelling omits
changes in soil carbon stocks, claiming that
“changes in carbon stocks in the fifth pool - soil
carbon - are the hardest to detect”. This is in
spite of the fact that in another report
COFORD states that % of Irish forestry’s
carbon is in the soil, explaining guilelessly that
“one of the main reasons for the high level of
soil carbon is that many Irish forests have been
established on peat soils, which have very high
levels of carbon to begin with”. Ouch! Clinch’s
and Convery’s clothes finally vanish altogether
when the end use of Ireland’s conifer planta-
tions is considered. Of too poor quality to pro-
duce solid construction grade timber, the trees
are turned into pallets, fenceposts, and chip-
boards. None of these has a long life, and when
they decay they release the stored carbon back
into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, to provide
Ireland with durable hardwood timber ,the
remnants of tropical forests are felled, contrib-
uting to accelerating third--world deforestation
and carbon emissions. How indeed can we ask
underdeveloped countries to account for their
emissions from deforestation while we shame-
lessly ‘game the system’ ourselves?
too much of this
