Few enterprises have gone through more radical changes in their approach to the environment than Bord na Móna. For decades, this semi-state company saw its mission almost entirely in terms of extracting peat profitably from bogs for energy and horticultural purposes, and providing many vital rural jobs.
In more recent years, however, the company has embraced a ‘new contract with nature’ and devoted significant resources to restoring and rehabilating severely degraded land, thus also providing first-class public recreational facilities. It has also engaged communities and stake-holders in the shaping of its local and national environmental policy. These include NGOs that remain, with some justification, critical of its energy policy,
The company’s new Biodiversity Action Plan 2016-21 demonstrates real progress. The previous five-year plan, the first to be produced by any corporation here, generated impressively thorough ecological surveys of its estate. Based on these surveys, 1,000 hectares of endangered active raised bog have been restored, to the degree that they can again produce peat, a natural process we had almost lost forever. And a further 12,000 hectares, 15 per cent of the company’s landholding, have been rehabilitated: that is, they will support diverse wetland and woodland plants and animals, though they will be different to their pre-extraction condition.
The new plan promises much more of the same, as exhausted bogs increasingly come on stream for rehabilitation. There is at least one significant new element: a company-wide natural capital accounting system. All losses and gains to ecosystem services (pollination, for example) due to company activities will be registered on its balance sheet.
Admirable as all this undoubtedly is, serious concerns remain about the company’s decision, announced last year, to continue turf-extraction, and turf-burning at three power stations, until 2030. An Taisce in particular has made a good case that the environmental costs of this time-frame, especially in terms of climate change, far outweigh any short-term economic benefits.
The company’s strategic framework for the future use of bogs, which is under review this year, invites and demands close scrutiny. But Bord na Móna also deserves due credit for moving further and faster in environmental awareness than most other companies here.