Trees grow on money but also on scientiﬁc advice

74 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 PB

As long as Ireland insists on importing conifers

from Scotland, current biosecurity is unlikely to

prevent the pine beetle arriving, any more than

Coveney’s ‘Fortress Ireland’ failed to avert ash

dieback in 2012.

Climate Cliff

But aorestation targets are no longer the sole

province of the Department of Agriculture.

Ireland’s Climate Action Plans requires 8,000

hectares a year of planting from 2021 to 2026, to

balance the carbon budget. In fact, with little

more than 2,000 hectares in the ﬁrst two years

(and little more expected this year after the

delays), the deﬁcit for this target will require a

planting of 12,000 hectares a year between now

and 2030 – or a deeper cut into another sector.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

recorded a 1.9% reduction in emissions last year

but the target was an average 7% cut annually to

2025. Annual cuts required will now be 12.4% in

order to avoid an ‘overshoot’ of the binding

carbon budgets.

And if that isn’t bad enough, the Climate

Change Advisory Council’s recent report

concludes that: “Realistic scenarios suggest that

target afforestation rates need to be

approximately 18,000 hectares per year to reach

carbon neutrality by 2050”. 18,000 is a lot more

than 2000. The data show a steady decline in

aorestation from 2016 onwards.

The Climate Change Advisory Council uses the

term ‘climate cliff’ to describe the almost

unbelievable fact that Ireland’s forestry estate is

no longer sequestering carbon but instead is

becoming a signiﬁcant source of Greenhouse

Gases (GHGs) – even when harvested wood

products (however short their lifespan) are

credited as carbon sinks.

UCD Professor Frank Coveney’s 2001 promise

of forestry providing a sink worth 10% of Ireland’s

emissions and the whipping up of hysteria for (EU

funded) ‘forestry’ omitted to account for the role

of soil in storing carbon. The soil counterintuitively

provides 85% of a forest’s carbon store - as

Village pointed out as early as 2009. While tree

deaths in natural forests tend not to disturb the

soil, industrial planting and felling tend to

degrade it. The eect is worst on bogs.

Is the money tree in fact beneath

our feet?

Putting the cart ﬁrmly before the horse, the

€1.3bn Plan for forestry has been drawn up

before the Government has agreed a target or

sectoral emissions ceilings for the land-use

sector as a whole where emissions are projected

to increase by 35% by 2030. Farmers themselves

have fallen from 85% of the forestry applications

in 2015 to 15% last year. Removing the

requirement to replant might be the only measure

that can give Irish forestry the boost it desperately

needs.

Ireland’s Forestry Plan only tinkers at the

edges. The new exemption for 1 hectare of trees

on a farm, for example, falls far short of the

5%-10% of each holding recommended by the

Climate Change Advisory Council. While the

broadleaf target has been increased

to 35% and a Farm Forestry Scheme

introduced which ﬁnally recognises

the value of ‘scrub’ land, the main

change was a substantial increase in

annual farmer forestry grants (now

almost twice the rate paid in the UK).

And if landowners are to be paid for

GHG sequestration, should they have

to pay for the emissions arising from

their land-use – say forestry on peat

soils?

Tony Lowes is a Director of Friends of

the Irish Environment

he landscape is covered with an ugly

and unnatural monoculture that has

disastrous eects on biodiversity.

These forests are then clear-felled - an

industrial process that leaves acidic

soil, stripped of nutrients and subject to the kind

of erosion and landslides that are becoming

semi-regular events

- Fintan O’Toole, the Irish Times, 2008

Deﬁciencies in Forestry

Programme

Does money grow on trees? It’s ironic that the

Agriculture Minister’s 2022 announcement of a

€1.3bn Forestry Programme 2023–2027 on 3

November 2022 was met by a frank letter from

the Land Use and Management Directorate of the

European Commission three weeks later that

ended up delaying the Programme until

September 2023. “The fact that the advice of the

scientists does not appear to be reﬂected in the

SEA Forestry Report is itself of concern”, Ion

Codescu of the EU wrote to Paticia Kelly of the

Department of Agriculture though, not

untypically, the Programme was ultimately

approved.

The issues will be all too familiar to readers of

this column. They remain the same as those that

lost Ireland the 75% EU funding in 2007 (think

€85 million a year for the 16 years since): lack of

broadleaves; monocultures managed by clearfell;

problem drainage; ﬂooding; bog slides

from planting on peat soils; loss of high

value ecological areas; phosphate

leachate; acidification; pollution

scavenging; threats to already threatened

birds – hen harriers, curlews, redshanks,

common snipe; the almost certain

extinction of viable fresh water pearl

mussels in their last eight catchments.

Draconian conditions introduced into

the Forest Service’s grants conditions in

2020 threaten a clawback of all monies if

pests or diseases undermine the viability

of the planting, a risk no ﬁnancial advisor

could allow to a farmer after ash dieback.

Trees grow on money but

also on scientiﬁc advice

In industrial forestry, CO2 emissions from soil

are greater than carbon storage in trees

By Tony Lowes

ENVIRONMENT

Conifers re vermin