Across many environmental and climate policies and schemes in Ireland, ambition is often stronger than implementation, Cara Augustenborg from the Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) said – speaking at the Teagasc Agriculture and Land Use conference in Portlaise on Tuesday.

Augustenborg said that implementation is struggling to keep up to the pace with our understanding of the science, therefore Ireland has become good at annual climate action plans, targets and road maps, but that some of them are not being successfully translated on the ground.

Forestry was pointed out as a clear example of this as she said Ireland continues to fail in meeting afforestation targets each year.

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“I don't think we have met one since 1993 I believe, so at the moment we have an annual planting target of 8,000 hectares per year, we'll probably hit about 3,000 hectares this year,” she explained.

There is a lot of debate on this issue and on reasons why it is not successful, however there is not much happening to resolve it and drive implementation forward, she said.

Augustenborg also spoke about the biomethane strategy launched by Government last year, and how the CCAC had been calling for a strategy to actually be implemented.

“I think we know that farmers want to be part of this, they want to do these climate actions on their farms, but they are not being given the support or the incentives to really do them at scale in the way that we need to,” she outlined.

Red tape

When participation is made difficult in environmental schemes due to unnecessary complexity, delays and uncertainty, commonly referred to as red tape, uptake and implementation is often reduced as a result, she explained.

She has found that even when schemes are deemed to be well designed, unnecessary burdens on applicants can still exist.

Another barrier to scheme uptake is that there are simply not enough people working in the civil service and private sector to complete applications at the scale that Government has committed to.

“An example of that would be that we have huge targets for peatland restoration in Ireland, tens of thousands of hectares that we want to restore, but we lack the staffing, the advisory systems and the institutional capacity needed to be able to do this at scale.”

Solutions

To help solve issues with the uptake and implementation of environmental schemes in Ireland, she outlined some recommendations from her research:

  • To redeploy and hire more people processing and working on these schemes and to ensure they are adequately trained to carry this out.
  • To align different types of policies better, such as policies on water, biodiversity and climate change, rather than seeing them as separate, by carrying out more cross departmental coordination and stakeholder engagement.
  • To allocate more funding and fiscal incentives like subsidies and taxes to schemes.
  • To align long-term political priorities with environmental actions.
  • To create a dedicated dialogue on the issue between farmers, rural workers and communities.