Madam, - Your Editorial of March 17th refers to the slowdown in the national afforestation programme and the need to get it back to a level of 10,000 hectares a year. It did not refer to one of the most significant benefits of afforestation: its role in tackling climate change. There are cogent environmental and economic arguments for getting the planting programme back to the level cited, and indeed beyond.
Climate change mitigation by forestry and other land uses comes about as a result of removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during plant growth, young forests being particularly effective. To put this into a national perspective, COFORD has forecast that new forests planted in Ireland since 1990 will remove 2.2 million tonnes of the gas from the atmosphere each year between now and 2012. This level of removal is being taken into account in Ireland's Kyoto compliance regime, and will benefit the Exchequer by €200 million over the five years to 2012.
New forests are also a source of renewable wood biomass. By 2020 wood biomass use in Ireland has the potential to replace over 2.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
However, such a level of replacement can only be sustained by getting the afforestation programme back on track. Otherwise, wood biomass supply from forests will gradually fall as they become more mature. - Yours, etc,
Dr EUGENE HENDRICK,
Director, COFORD
(National Council for Forest Research and Development),
Sandyford, Dublin 18.