Funferal

Ireland gets mixed score on environmental performance

I came by chance across a report published earlier this year by researchers at Yale and Columbia, assessing the environmental standing of countries around the world. The Pilot 2006 Environmental Performance Index is based, according to the authors, on two objectives:

1. reducing environmental stresses on human health and
2. protecting ecosystem vitality.

I was particularly interested, of course, in examining how Ireland fared in the results, and they were varied to say the least. While getting an encouraging 10th place ranking in the overall study, and doing slightly better than both its income peer group average and its geographic peer group average, Ireland did particularly poorly on ‘biodiversity and habitat’, with a score of 26.2, as against income group average of 43.7 and a geographic group score of 42.6. This put Ireland 116th (out of 133 countries ranked) on this measure.
Given how well – comparatively – Ireland did on other measures (especially water and environmental health) why did it fall down on this measure? Within this category, Ireland meets or exceeds targets on water consumption, but misses the target on timber harvesting (harvesting 5.1% a year, as opposed to the target rate of 1%). Ireland does incredibly poorly on wilderness protection, with only 3.2% of wild areas being protected (note that this is a percentage of wild areas, not of total land mass). On ecoregion protection, too, Ireland does poorly. Here the measure is somewhat complex, with a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 meaning that 10% of each biome is protected. Ireland scores 0.11.
Some readers will be familiar with the various debates and controversies in Ireland relating to protection of wilderness areas – the storm faced by Michael D. Higgins when he tried to improve protections was particularly fierce. However, it’s clear that we are falling behind commonly accepted standards on this score.