Forestry Industries Ireland (FII) has said that Ireland’s “once large scale” commercial forestry model has become “side-tracked” and is becoming a “small, niche activity”.
FII, which is an Ibec group representing businesses in the forestry and timber sectors, has called for the government to bring more “scalability” to the sector.
“The growth of Irish forestry has slowed considerably in recent years, and is going to cause trouble for our climate targets,” the group said.
According to FII, Ireland would save around €1 billion in “carbon costs” if it meets its forest cover target for 2050.
Mark McAuley, the director of FII, said: “Forestry is a big player in Ireland’s climate targets. We were planting over 20,000ha per annum in the 1990s when there was a strong focus on conifers and developing our national timber resources.
“This sort of scale is how forestry delivers on climate targets. Today, we are only planting around 2,000ha per annum because of ever-increasing restrictions and the dilution of the commercial model. Too much land is excluded and conifers are not being prioritised,” McAuley added.
He said that the Irish model required a “firm focus” on financial options for farmers and conifer-based commercial forestry.
“We need to inject a large dose of realism into our forestry planning and re-focus on planting commercial forests that make sense for private landowners and that provide a valuable timber resource to support home building and the low-carbon future we need.
“We need to bring things back into the real world and encourage farmers to plant valuable crops of commercial trees. All forests we plant have diverse tree species and biodiversity areas, but we need to also look after the financial return to the landowner, otherwise they won’t plant,” the FII director said.
He added: “It is naive to think Ireland can create a scalable model based solely on nature forestry and native woodland. If we want to see farmers plant in large numbers, then they have to see a good commercial return from their valuable land.”
“We need more forestry to diversify our agricultural land use and help fight climate change. To do that we need scale, and not to reduce our ambitions to only planting small areas of native woodlands,” McAuley added.