The Irish Times view on peat importation: The need to think ahead

Irish horticulturalists have just had to start importing the peat they use as a growing medium, instead of sourcing it locally. This appears to fly in the face of climate change mitigation policy.

The first consignment travelled 3000 km, from Latvia to Drogheda, and then had to be trucked to producers. Previously the average transport distance, according to Growing Media Ireland, the industry body, was just 10km. It's a fair point that it makes no sense to add to the carbon footprint of horticultural peat used in Ireland, when the reason we stopped mining it here in the first place was to prevent further carbon emissions from Irish bogs, and to restore them as carbon sinks. Moreover, the added costs of importation will doubtless be passed on at the shop counter.

Last week some members of the Oireachtas agriculture committee, reflecting anger within the horticulture sector, accused Minister of State for Heritage Malcolm Noonan of imposing a self-contradictory "Green agenda" at the expense of business, workers and consumers. The Minister responded that the decision to halt the extraction of horticultural peat on bogs was not Government policy (which keeps use of this medium legal until at least 2030), but the consequence of a complex planning case taken successfully by Friends of the Irish Environment against peat producers.

That is a fair point too, but it does not absolve either the Minister, or the industry, of the obligation to move faster to resolve the core issue: developing new, climate-friendly growing media to replace peat. The report of a working group to the Minister is still awaited, yet last week’s importation was a surprise long foretold. This saga illustrates that climate and biodiversity policies demand much more rigorously coherent planning, within the framework of a common metric such as that offered by natural capital accounting.

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