How a forestry company is renaturalising peatland forests in Ireland

Coillte is an Irish state-owned forestry business, managing 440,000 hectares of forests and lands across the country. Coillte’s purpose is to manage the state forests on behalf of the people of Ireland; as part of their new strategic vision for forestry, the organisation aims to implement rewetting processes which will restore 30,000 hectares of peatland by 2050. 

Peatlands are valuable natural habitats and serve as important carbon sinks. As part of the wildE project, Coillte is managing a case study area of plantation conifer forestry on blanket bog and heath in Connemara, western Ireland, which it aims to renaturalise to improve the site’s carbon sequestration capabilities and habitat potential.

Undoing peatland degradation

In Ireland, Atlantic blanket bogs once covered an area of over 773,000 hectares. These peatlands are recognised as a unique and valuable habitat for nature conservation, however centuries of degradation caused by draining, cutting and, more recently, inappropriate afforestation and overgrazing have depleted them by more than 80%.

Two parcels of these degraded peatlands are located across 217 hectares of private land within Galway Wind Park, the location of this wildE case study. The case study site is a mountainous area home to an inappropriate forest plantation which has impacted local biodiversity. In 2017, there was a major forest fire in the area, which burnt 20 hectares of land and caused damage to the surrounding areas, further degrading habitats.

How are the peatlands being restored

To minimise the emissions of the wind farm and to encourage carbon sequestration in the area, the Coillte team is examining greenhouse gas emission reductions on the peatlands and their interaction with the greenhouse gas impacts of the wind farm.

To achieve this, they are building on data collected from biodiversity surveys to improve the mapping of the blanket bog area to help identify which areas have high potential for restoration, as well as any landowners who may be willing to participate. By assessing the existing condition of the blanket bog, they are also providing habitat management guidance for improving the structure and functions of the degraded bogs so that they can be restored to a more natural state.

What does this mean for climate mitigation?

In doing so, the project will allow the wind farm site to reduce their carbon footprint and will enhance local biodiversity. There is a key focus of carbon sequestration - peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests, and so in restoring the land to a more natural state, the area could become carbon neutral or negative.

Furthermore, by restoring these peatlands, one of the most important outcomes will be the improvement of the nationally important wintering area of the Greenland white fronted goose.