Sir, – “Ireland needs more wild native forests – not lifeless Sitka plantations” (Eoghan Daltun, Opinion & Analysis, September 7th) states that we are incentivising the wrong kind of forestry.
While it is true that incentives still exist for Sitka spruce and other conifer monocultures, even the 2013 plan included significantly higher incentives for mixed deciduous woodland of exclusively native species.
In fact, these represent the highest premium category. This is extended in the current plan, which also includes additional incentives for continuous cover forestry (as distinct from clearfelling). By the very nature of mixed woodlands, given that oaks and birch and alder have widely different maturities, clearfelling would not make even commercial sense.
Coillte is committed to replanting significant percentages of clearfelled conifier plantations (typically at 35 to 40 years of maturity, so there is a long time lag) with mixed native species, and even a casual survey will reveal that this is ongoing, although it does not appear to suit the narrative.
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While I love my wild native woodland as much as the next person, it seems to me that a quasi-religious devotion to purely natural woodland (unplanted) is a hindrance rather than a help to rapidly enhancing biodiversity and achieving climate change reversal. – Is mise,
COLM WARD,
KIlgarvan,
Co Kerry.
Sir, – With 7 per cent of land ownership in Ireland, Coillte has shown that it can do things at scale. We need that big landscape-scale thinking now more than ever but it needs to be in the context of biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. Its economic model where it makes profits almost exclusively from timber production via Sitka spruce plantations needs to change to one that pays them per ton of carbon sequestered.
This could still mean planting Sitka spruce on suitable soils and where the clear-fell process is evaluated in terms of carbon loss through drainage and soil disturbance but more likely it would result in huge areas of their estate, where far more carbon would be captured by reinstating blanket bogs and wetland areas or by protecting, enhancing and enlarging the small patches of native woodlands into much longer-term forests.
There are plenty of ecologists who could be employed in assessing what action sequesters the most carbon and some mechanism devised to pay Coillte accordingly. Not only would we get carbon capture at scale but it would also give us varied timber production and huge benefits for biodiversity as natural habitats are reinstated. – Yours, etc,
ZEF KLINKENBERGH,
Glendalough,
Co Wicklow.