Minister for Nature, Heritage and Electoral Reform, Malcolm Noonan announced funding today (Wednesday, March 6) of €34 million for a new LIFE Strategic Nature Project involving biodiversity data.
The nine-year project will bring biodiversity information from multiple sources together for better decision making and to support better tracking of progress towards targets.
The project aims to help plan, fund and deliver action for nature across Ireland.
It is led by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) as Ireland’s largest LIFE Nature Project, and supported by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) and Coillte Nature.
It will support nature restoration in three ways:
- By providing information on nature conservation measures;
- Identifying gaps in conservation and restoration work, along with informing of further measures to advance restoration;
- Enhance Ireland’s capacity to secure funding for conservation and restoration through the establishment of a national complementary funding unit.
Director of Coillte Nature, Dr. Ciarán Fallon said that the project will allow Coillte Nature to undertake a 500ha blanket bog restoration project in the west of Ireland.
Biodiversity data
“This Strategic Nature Project will also promote information sharing and create synergies across the peatland restoration community in Ireland and create benefits which extend well beyond the restoration project site,” Dr. Fallon said.
Minister of State for Land Use and Biodiversity at DAFM, Pippa Hackett said that “valuable data” has been collected as part of the department’s work over the past number of years through advisory and scoring in programmes, such as LIFE projects.
“This nine-year project will allow us to make the most of those incredibly rich information stores, and use that data more effectively so that we can better understand trends,” Minister Hackett said.
Minister Noonan said: “This project promises to be a hugely positive initiative that will enhance our national capacity to deliver real impact for nature and – crucially – to demonstrate the value of that work.”