Professor Jane Stout

Forestry provides timber, but also supports biodiversity and supplies other public benefits, including carbon capture to tackle climate change. To provide a sustainable supply of multiple benefits from Irish forests, this project will co-develop tools for foresters to enable robust and transparent management decision-making. A Natural Capital Accounting approach will be used at specific forest sites, which will enable quantification of forestry stocks (the amount, location and condition of forest habitats), and flows of ecosystem services (in terms of commercial timber production, carbon sequestration, water retention, biodiversity and recreation) and benefits. By assessing the quantity, quality and location of forest stocks, flows of commercial timber production, carbon sequestration, water retention, biodiversity and recreation will be determined. This will be modelled under different land management scenarios to provide managers will the information they need to fulfil multiple objectives at both site and estate level. This is the first project to combine Natural Capital Accounting with Bayesian Belief Network modelling of ecosystem service supply to support a structured decision-making approach in an Irish context.

Nature+Energy is founded on the idea that wind farms have the potential to provide so much more than renewable energy. If managed properly, the biodiversity on onshore wind farms has the potential to take additional carbon out of the atmosphere, to improve the resilience of ecosystems to climate change and to enhance the provision of ecosystem services, such as pollination, water filtration and habitat provision. There is much potential to enhance nature"s contributions to people through improving our understanding of how habitat quality, diversity and connectivity can be enhanced by wind farm land-management for conservation.Nature+Energy will develop new ways of accounting for the value of nature on onshore wind farms. We will design a state-of-the-art environmental monitoring system that will revolutionise how we measure and monitor biodiversity on wind farms. We will develop a sector-specific Natural Capital Accounts, Decision Support Tools and Biodiversity Action Plans to facilitate the enhancement of biodiversity and to mitigate the effects of wind farms on key species. A graduate training programme will be co-developed by industry and academia partners with the goal of building human capacity in natural capital accounting, and will be key in delivering the upskilling required to facilitate Ireland"s transition to a net-zero society and economy. By focusing on solutions for overcoming the twin problems of climate change and biodiversity loss, this project gives us the opportunity to showcase how researchers and industry can work together to develop genuine win-win scenarios for the economy, society and the environment. https://www.marei.ie/project/natureenergy/

Farm Zero C is a collaboration between Carbery, BiOrbic, UCD, TCD, MTU, Teagasc and others to create a climate-neutral, economically-viable dairy farm. The project takes a holistic approach, combining a range of technologies and practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the productivity and resilience of the farm. https://biorbic.com/farm-zero-c/

FOREST brings together research leaders across Botany, Economics, Engineering, Finance, Geography and Statistics to reimagine our relations with nature. People and nature are not separate - we are dependent on nature as our life support system. The systematic failure of economic, political, and financial systems to take nature into account has resulted in climate and biodiversity crises. Ireland is now seeking to transition away from highly carbon-dependent social and economic practices, towards sustainable practices, systems and behaviours that support the coexistence of flourishing human systems and natural environments. This project will investigate how to assign value to the natural world to create investment initiatives with ecological benefits, to encourage investors to actively invest in assets with environmental and societal benefits. It will examine the behavioural aspects and financial investment incentives that can be linked to the protection or restoration of forests. However, placing a financial value on nature is not enough to preserve it, there must also be policy initiatives, and stronger legal mechanisms which recognise the multiple benefits of forests such as carbon capture, biodiversity habitat, and recreation. The financial industry is beset by a focus on short term gains, caused by performance metrics, remuneration incentives and incomplete measures of value. Policy supports can to some extent address these market failures by creating incentives which incorporate the long term non-market and socio-cultural benefits of nature. To correctly design incentives, an understanding of different perspectives on the values and benefits of nature in the widest sense is key, particularly in terms of impacting on individual and collective action. Actions taken have consequences for environment, people, and economies, but are often only assessed through a single lens. Implementing the right action in the right place urgently requires a new kind of multi-disciplinary dynamic, and a way of integrating data measured on different scales. This research challenge is inherently multidisciplinary in nature and will be conducted in conjunction with researchers across a range of relevant disciplines. FOREST will use the increase in forestry in Ireland as a model system to explore the challenges associated with addressing climate and biodiversity issues, and examine potential solutions through a multi-disciplinary lens. It will recruit a team of PhD candidates to study as part of an interdisciplinary team to address complex human-nature relations and the social-economic-ecological challenges and opportunities associated with transitioning away from unsustainable to sustainable development pathways.

Pollinators provide a crucial ecosystem service by facilitating the reproduction of wild plants, thus supporting a vast majority of global plant diversity. Pollinators are also important to food security, ensuring the successful pollination of many commercially important crops. However, pollinators are at risk, with 50% of Ireland's bee species in decline and 30% of species threatened with extinction. Agricultural intensification and other industrial developments are a major driver of decline, with an associated loss of forage plants and nesting habitats, contamination of soils and forage with pollutants, and disease transfer between wild and managed bee species. To address these issues, on-farm biodiversity enhancement measures and other schemes have been proposed. Many of these schemes are part of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan. These measures need testing for efficacy and economic sustainability, in commercial situations, both on farms and on other agri-food industrial sites. This project will survey pollinators and their forage plants on working farms of the Enterprise Partner and their suppliers, both where biodiversity management actions have been implemented, and where they have not. In addition, similar surveys will be conducted on industrial sites belonging to the Enterprise Partner. Cost-benefit analysis will be conducted for all financial and non-financial costs and benefits of biodiversity enhancement implementation. This will provide crucial ecological information on farmland biodiversity in Ireland and inform the business case for further biodiversity enhancement and pollinator conservation. As such, the project contributes to national policy on biodiversity conservation, natural capital assessment, and business and biodiversity.