The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recommended that a study to discover the ability of Irish hedgerows to capture or sequester carbon should be undertaken.

Many farmers and farm organisations have long argued that hedgerows on their farms should be counted towards the ability of the sector to sequester carbon.

Some 689,000km of hedgerow are estimated to exist in Ireland, according to the report, titled BRIAR: Biomass retrieval in Ireland using active remote sensing.

This is more than double the length of hedgerow that was previously thought to be around the country.

Previous study

Although a previous EPA study in 2014 estimated that hedgerow and non-forest woodland and scrub could potentially be sequestering 0.66t-3.3t of CO2/ha/year, the more recent 2019 study says that “the sequestration impacts of hedgerow management are entirely unknown.”

This is partly due to the many different definitions of the hedgerow used in county surveys, and is one of the reasons why a study would help to discover the actual ability of hedgerows to sequester carbon.

The study also notes that there has been a slight drop in the area of hedges around the country, but attributes this in part to the tidying and closer cutting of hedgerows with more advanced machinery in recent years.

According to this latest research, the county with the most hedgerows is Cork, followed by Tipperary and then Galway.