Irish Forestry Coverage
A huge part of the environment that we live in here on Earth is covered with forestry. Trees make up a third of the total land area of the entire and the United States has 30 to 35% land coverage. If trees are left to their own devices, undisturbed by either catastrophes or interference by man, they will grow quite happily and forests will probably live indefinitely in our environment. The benefits of having forests and trees in our environment are immeasurable not only to man but to many other life forms that live on this planet.
Irish forestry has in the past has almost dwindled to extinction, in fact many species of trees were extinct at one stage, needing to be reintroduced. At one stage in Ireland’s development, although a very long time ago, Ireland was covered with many trees that were once part of the great Northern European forest. By 1900, this forest coverage had decreased to only 1%. Now, with successive governments and outside pressures on them, the coverage in Ireland’s forestry has reached approximately 10%. The total land area in Ireland is 6,889,000 ha. The land under forestry coverage in Ireland is 669,000 hectares. One of the best achievements in recent years in forestry Ireland was an overall increase of 65% between the years 1992 to 2005. But, the 10% coverage of Irish forestry is only a small amount in comparison to the European average. We have a long way to go before we get anywhere near that figure of 42%. The methods the government are implementing to achieve better forest coverage is to provide as many incentives as possible for private landowners to put some of their land at least into forestry plantations.
Every country has the duty to try and increase the amount of forestry that they have. Global forestry is decreasing by a staggering 20,000 ha per day. This means that every single year and an area of forest that is roughly the size of the Republic of Ireland is being lost. Even during the hard times that we are experiencing presently in the Republic of Ireland, the progress still seems to be ongoing. I think there are several reasons for this, unlike most things in life the main reason seems to be one of economics, and so be it.