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18% target for forest cover by 2050 - how to get there?

JupiterKid

Hello there,

Occasional poster on the farming & forestry forum but new on this particular sub-forum.

I was reading the Forestry Strategy 2023-2030 recently and it seems that the long-term goal is to try to increase Ireland’s forest cover from just under 12% currently to 18% or greater by 2050, mainly to meet out CO2 emission targets to use our trees as a CO2 sink and for biodiversity/economic growth objectives in rural communities.

However, reading the last Coillte annual report, we are only planting about 2,000 hectares of trees ATM and would need to increase planting to something like 8,500 ha. of new trees each year up to 2050 to meet the 18% target. That’s a more than fourfold increase in current planting rates!

How can this realistically be achieved? More favorable grants for silviculture activity by farmers/landowners and changing our current agri policies to favour more forestry?

What are the big barriers do you see in terms of increasing the tree planting, and especially native broadleaf tree planting over the next decade and beyond if we are to come anything near meeting the 2050 target?

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Good loser

That target is a complete and utter joke, with not a chance in hell of being achieved. Don't waste time thinking about it.

lawred2

You could just picture the Sitka dead zones

timfromtang

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058340243/18-target-for-forest-cover-by-2050-how-to-get-there

I see the negative posts outweigh the positive so far,,

"not a chance in hell"

"sitka dead zones"

gentlemen and ladies, I am sure we can do better than this.

In the past our island was a temperate rain forest

climate change is now seriously out of hand (sea surface temperatures 4 std deviations above the norm! for example)

folk like me who have been learning aobut humans impact on our biosphere are in full panic mode, it would appear that major ecosystem collapse is ongoing

we can do better?

for example peat bogs store much more carbon per unit area per year than do forests, we are rewetting the bogs to restore this carbon sink.

The climate is FUBAR, its getting worse, its our fault, come on folks, is the future of our children important to you or not?

Tim

lawred2

Of course it could be done better.

It won't be though. It'll be plantations of sitka for export

blue5000

Part of the problem is how we measure forest cover and compare it with our EU masters. We have thousands of kms of hedgerows which AFAIK aren't counted. I was in Germany last year and they have loads of little isolated forests no bigger than a ha, but no hedges or tree cover to join up the little forests. So from a biodiversity point of view the little German forests are a lot worse than our hedges.

If a farmer wants to plant Sitka Spruce today they can only plant 65% of it in SS. 35% of it is either hardwoods or eco area. Does Coilte do this? No amount of subsidies will encourage farmers to plant good land. There are a couple of reasons for this;

The land is gone from agriculture forever.

The bureaucracy and red tape involved is just too much. Look at the 18 month delays to get a felling license for example.

There are really only 3 major sawmills in Ireland. If trees are scarce and rising in price the sawmills can import logs from abroad to suppress the Irish sawlog price. Think beef cartel.... Another problem with importing logs is that diseases like fire blight or spruce beetles can be imported also.

The whole Hen Harrier fiasco. Thousands of hectares of upland which is perfectly suitable for forestry simply devalued at the stroke of a pen. When in actual fact young forest areas have ideal cover for the hen harrier to hunt over. Forestry is a crop with a 30 year rotation. The birds are able to move to a new area as one area gets closed in at about year 10 after planting. In 20 years, after clear felling the area becomes available to the birds again.

Everybody outside forestry hates sitka, wall to wall, sterile conifers, no wildlife, dark etc. I think this is bullshite. Sitka grows fast, straight and is a very useful timber for construction, pallets fencing etc. It is ideally suited to our climate and grows well on wet soils which have limited agricultural use. The whole agro-forestry scheme is a sham. What will the timber in these areas be used for? I'll tell you, woodchip and firewood because there won't be a decent 5m knot free sawlog in any of it, ever. Carbon sequestration is all well and good but no Irish farmer has been paid a red cent for it yet.

Good loser

Spot on blue 2000.

Nobody seems to talk about wall to wall ryegrass or barley or wheat!

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121903141#Comment_121903141

Fraid I can't agree with you on Sitka - most plantations are dark and sterile and many around my place in North Mayo are piss poor quality with much windthrow etc. Locals in much of the West are getting sick of being swamped by them too via Vulture fund investors. Industrial forestry operations on peat soils are also a leading cause of water pollution in many upland catchments as recent figures from the EPA etc. show not to mention the flooding issues from suppression of natural vegetation within these sterile plots. Spruce monocultures are also raising the risk of disease and pests as the climate warms, as can been with current issues with Pine Weevils etc.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121904102#Comment_121904102

Really - i think there is much talk about issues with forced monoculture PRG swards regarding heavy Chem N inputs, worm burdens in stock etc.

Good loser

I have grown ryegrass for 50 years and find it uniformly satisfactory and highly productive. There are always plenty of 'invasive species' creeping into it though, some welcome and some not.

Caquas

In the worst example of fake news I have seen in the Irish media, the Irish Times has withdrawn an article it published with the headline : “Coillte commits to planting native tree species only from 2025 on”.

That would have been extraordinary news in the forestry sector except that Coillte has made no commitment bearing any resemblance to this headline. In fact, Coillte’s policy is that it hopes to “enable the creation of 100,000 hectares of new forests by 2050, half of which will be native woodlands”.

So the facts are:

no “commitment”, only an aspiration.

Not next year but in a quarter of a century.

Not all, just half.

This fake news is not a typo or a technical error or a misunderstanding. It seems to be a story invented out of thin air by the Irish Times. Or did someone deliberately mislead the Irish Time? If so, did the Times not fact check?

The Irish Times offers its readers no apology for misleading them so badly and no explanation for how this fiasco happened. If I read it on Facebook. I’d think “serve me right for clicking that link!

Of course fake news travels fast and this fake news is already on social media.

Coillte and native tree species: Correctionhttps://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/03/18/coillte-and-native-tree-species-correction/

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121909555#Comment_121909555

Sums up Coillte and other Semi States like BNM, full of Greenwash BS while continuing to drive Biodiversity decline across the board

Good loser

If they had made such a commitment it would have indicated a complete withdrawal from the real world and commonsense. The Board would have been dismissed.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121911015#Comment_121911015

The real world of mass environmental destruction, water pollution, plant disease issues and isolation of rural communities?? I'd say most locals around these areas would say we could do with a little less of the slash and burn approach in favor of more sustainable forestry models as practiced in other parts of Europe. State land should be used to benefit the Irish Public at large, not just a handfull of fat cats at board level

Caquas

Here's the original story. A hoax Press Release was sent to the IT, claiming to be from Coillte.

What a shambles for the IT to run this gob-smacking story without picking up the phone to Coillte!

Still no apology or explanation.

Surely this is worse than publishing nonsense about "cultural appropriation" and fake tanning.

Good loser

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121911026#Comment_121911026

That's a pretty inane contribution. The so called 'fat cats at the board' are mniiscule beneficiaries of the Coillte organization. All they get, or should get, are their director's fees. the business of Coillte is primarily the production and sale of timber for a profit. Their TO was €479m in 2022 and profit €118m. The main beneficiaries of the enterprise are their workers, suppliers and customers (the saw milling sector) All these would slowly dwindle to nothingness in the event of a switch to 'only native trees'. Any Board that allowed that would have to be sacked.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915322#Comment_121915322

Thats like saying the ESB are doing a great job making huge profits via gouging their customers as widely reported in the media recently. Most forestry operations these days are highly automated so Coillte is providing no great employment for the ongoing damage they do to rural communities or the environment which has an ongoing large negative economic impact of its own. Given the p*ss poor quality of much of their plantations alot of there "turnover" consists of low grade pulp. In contrast Ireland has to import nearly all its hardwood and timber construction needs, much of it coming from illegal rainforest destruction in the likes of Myanmar, DRC etc. thanx to the failure of Coillte and the state forestry service to make any efforts to develop the sector over the course of now 80 plus years. In contrast the likes of France have community hardwood forests that are selectively harvested on a tree by tree basis without destructive clearcutting methods so beloved here. In turn this brings in serious income for whole communties with French Oak currently making eyewatering money on the likes of the Chinese market.

Good loser

Coillte runs a viable, profitable business and gives an annual dividend to the State. It does not operate a monopoly. It's a tough business to make money at. It supplies/owns at least three large board mills and supplies huge quantities of softwood to the large, efficient saw milling sector as well an many, many pallet/stake/pulpwood operators. It continues to do a good job. If anyone wants to set up a 'community,hardwood, forest with selective thinning' there is nothing stopping them.

Melodeon

If the Irish state, as representative of Irish society in general, truly considers extensive native woodland and forests to be a worthy aspiration,(which it undoubtedly is, on a national scale), they need to put their money where their mouth is if they want to make it happen.

Coillte are constrained to the land area they already have, and even though they are (slowly) converting some of it from conifer to broadleaves, I suspect a fair amount of their area that was historically planted on bare mountain peatland and the like will probably not be replanted after harvest and at best will be 'managed' towards rewilding. The same goes for deeper lowland peatlands that should never have been planted in the first place.

No sane private landowner is going to commit their land, no matter how poor to middling it is for agricultural purposes, to mixed broadleaf woodland which has no prospect whatsoever of generating any sort of meaningful income in a timescale that's measured in human generations.

Like it or not, the days of the independently wealthy great estate owner who could dedicate a significant area of land to altruistic endeavours like rewilding or the establishment of native forests are long gone.

So, if The State wants more land under native broadleaf forest than currently exists, it (The State) must make it economically viable for individual private landowners to plant such forests. Altruism and 'the greater good' and such are all fine and dandy, but at the level of the individual landowner, they put no spuds on the table. This is why spruce plantations are the standard: they hold out the reasonable prospect of generating a significant income during the lifetime of the original landowner.

At the very least, if The State really and truly wants all native broadleaf forests, it must provide for an ongoing income broadly comparable with the agricultural potential of the land in question. And, given the timescales involved, that 'income' must be index-linked and multi-generational too. Let it be considered a 'wage' for managing and maintaining the lovely new woodland and facilitating public access or somesuch, but in all reality, no individual landowner is going to commit their land to this purpose without something along these lines.

Another alternative, of course, would be for The State to use the CPO (Compulsory Purchase Order) system to take ownership of suitable lands for this purpose and create true extensive 'National Parks' managed as such. The Constitutional and legal hurdles involved would be considerable, to say the very least.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121921063#Comment_121921063

A significant amount of taxpayer monies are already committed to forestry here, with the bulk going to spruce forestry. Better species mix and forestry operations that do not involve significant run-off, damage to key habitats and use of chemicals etc. should be the basic minimum requirements for such schemes funded by the public purse.

timfromtang

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121921063#Comment_121921063

Perhaps my we are insane here in Tang,

"No sane private landowner is going to commit their land, no matter how poor to middling it is for agricultural purposes, to mixed broadleaf woodland which has no prospect whatsoever of generating any sort of meaningful income in a timescale that's measured in human generations."

We have 33Ha planted with a very diverse mix of broadleaves and some conifers (scots. larch, norway).

Our forest is a popular destination for Knowledge Transfer Groups.

Having started planting in 1996, we now generate income from our forest. How you might ask? We add value to all of our produce before sale. The firewood we sell is cut and split our customers mostly season the wood themselves (they simply keep a suitable stock so that the timber is dry by the time it is burnt). We make charcoal for smelters and smiths from the tops of the trees material below 75mm dia that is unsuitable for firewood. We have a small sawmill and produce larch fenceposts and trailer floors. We also saw some of our hardwoods at small diameters and can sell this produce, recently I sold a load of 6mm Ash veneer to a man who used it to finish the interior of a camper van. We provide pioneering poles and amenity to scout groups. We provide sawmilling services to folk who want to have some timber cut up (one of my customers runs a "Glamping" operation and regularly turns up with logs to be sawn). We do all of the forest operations ourselves and so earn "wages" getting the grant money for various forest operations Thinning and tending etc.

It is not all a bed of roses of course, we have faced significant difficulties over this time, but we overcome. Ash dieback is a bit of a disaster for us, and we have just applied for the reconstitution grant, we will do all of the felling and timber removal ourselves and have our forestry company (SWS forestry) look after replanting. The reconstitution grant works out at about €1/tree felled, and we will be able to sell the timber for firewood and some of the larger stuff as planks. I have learned that proffessional tree planters are worth the investment as they are much faster and get better survival rates than we can achieve ourselves, we learned this through experience having tried planting ourselves in the past.

To get over the problem of the loss of 27 years of growing time we will plant some 12 year old whips of high value trees when we replant to recover some of the lost increment, perhaps 50 stems/Ha.

Am I insane??

Tim

Good loser

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121925780#Comment_121925780

No you are not (quite) insane but you are exceptional, if not unique. You seem to be a full time timber processor - a very specialized trade which very very few (if any) could replicate. Melodeon, on the other hand, is talking about the common land owner who will/may offer land only, or small labour input into a plantation. In other words you are talking apples; he is talking oranges. One should compare like with like. I fully agree with everything Melodeon has written. It is worse than the situation he outlines in one significant way. By subterfuge, slight of hand, or whatever the State has got to the situation that the percentage of reforested land given to hardwoods or set backs has soared to between 25% and 50% (I am not sure of the figure). This is effectively, as Melodeon infers, confiscation. Any landowner that planted in the past (as I did) with an obligation to replant should be entitled to the same terms and conditions as were existent back in the 1990's. Changes since then should be compensated financially or the obligation to replant should be removed.

timfromtang

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121929517#Comment_121929517

Thank you for your clarification, you are of course correct.

I would point out however that in France and other places where continuous cover forestry is practiced, incomes of €500/Ha/Yr are typical from the sale (Standing) of quality hardwood. This would of course require an industrial base to consume that quality hardwood which is sadly lacking on our green little island.

Tim

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121929517#Comment_121929517

Know several folks from back home(Kildare/Wicklow Border) who are producing a decent income from mixed woodlands like Tim, so its not actually that rare these days. Its like any other business, the more you put in, the more you get out. Unfortunately the standard Irish model of sowing a load of spruce on often unsuitable sites, closing the gate and expecting a quality product at the end is all too common, which is why we have to import so much construction and furniture grade wood, thereby missing out on a sustainable forest industry that brings serious added value compared to low grade spruce pulp

Deub

The forest coverage in Ireland is shocking and while hedgerows help a bit, it is no way comparable to a forest. Not all species living in woods can live in hedgerows only.

The target is too ambitious but my main problem is what is their plan to achieve it?

In my view, you need the 2 main components below to succeed:

Change mentality. The country is in this situation for decades and people grew up in this environment so they don’t see it as a problem. You still hear too often that planting trees in good land is a waste and trees should only be planted in marginal land.You need to change the mentality by teaching it at schools, doing campaign, etc. It takes time.
There needs to be some short term benefits for farmers. You can’t simply say “plant good lands”. They need to be able to get some income from it to mitigate the original loss. It starts with making felling a lot easier and faster. We all know increasing forest coverage is a good thing but everyone needs to contribute. Not only farmers, but also the State and the taxpayers. It can be subsidies covering majority of he loss for the farmers.

Good loser

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121932208#Comment_121932208

'The more you put in the more you get out' !! Tell that to the guys that planted all their land with Ash or Larch. Until recently, and probably continuing, those ash guys required a Felling Licence to clear their DEAD TREES plus an obligation to replant.

Ak84

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121935548#Comment_121935548

Someone should tell them that.

Someone should also tell them that it is not wise to cover your whole land in 1 species of anything.

Plant diseases are not a new occurrence.

It is all very unfortunate, and I have great sympathy for such a landowner, but as you can see from Tim's postings, a forestry business can be profitable, if you put the work in.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121935548#Comment_121935548

Proves monocultures are bad - whether it be spruce or ash. I was talking about Mixed Forests anyways if you actually bothered to read what I posted🙄

PS: also shows the folly of this state failing to develop an indigenous mixed species forest nursery sector with an ongoing heavy reliance on imported stock with the obvious disease risk that carries

Good loser

So 'the more you put in the more you get out' is a principle that only applies where thee are not monocultures!!

What then about the guy beside me with 250 acres of your beloved hardwoods. The whole place grew very badly and there must be 100 acres plus of ash in that - all dying or dead for years. Some 5 years ago he was not allowed clearfell the ash when a blind man could see it was the only sensible thing to do.

JupiterKid

Some really good points raised here in this thread.

So it appears that there are many important issues and barriers to increasing the planting rate of new forests in Ireland on private lands that need to be addressed if there is to be any hope of achieving the National Forestry and Coillte's long-term target of 18% tree cover by 2050.

These barriers seem, from the discussion here, to be economic (inadequate subsidies/incentives for planting by farmers/landowners, cultural (overcoming the prevailing mindset that only marginal lands are suitable for trees), environmental (avoiding monoculture species planting to avoid risks of disease wiping out the entire stock) and possibly also a need to look at long-term supports for landowners planting hardwood trees that may take a number of generations to mature to harvest quality.

If there were additional economic/financial supports made available would it help? Maybe more education workshops for landowners interested in looking at silviculture as a long-term option?

toothy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122022988#Comment_122022988

The problem is the Greens and their ideology through Pipa Hackett who came up with the current ludicrous policy.

Planting is down 50% and forecast to be down 75%

There was a segment about this on RTE Radio 1 worth listening to

There's an increasingly overt hatred of conifers being shown when it is established that pine and conifer covered vast swathes of the uplands and poorer soils, the now peat biased soils.

These soils are now barred from planting because of the peat when this would actually be habitat restoration, continuous cover forestry could be practiced and this would enhance water control and mitigate flooding downstrean.

We simply cannot do without conifers for the commercial forestry sector and construction sector. If we don't have them the commercial forestry sector will collapse and we'll simply end up importing them from Scotland and Europe for the few remaining mills if any survive.

Marginal land can take a main conifer crop with pioneer species such as birch and alder maybe even some oak. The conifer on these lands can be Douglas Fir and this type of forest is an exceptionally nice place to visit and provides a strong habitat for birds and other species.

If the government truly wanted to plant mineral soils with deciduous broadleaves or hardwoods they would have to pay for the opportunity cost lost to these owners. So this would be circa €1000 per hectare, per year, adjusted upwards for inflation every year, in perpetuity for the land change is also permanent.

Anything short of the above is doomed to failure.