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National Parks

Ireland has six national parks that combine the protection of natural environments and the reception of the public. They offer numerous hiking trails and will delight nature lovers and those who love wide open spaces.

Connemara National Park: located in County Galway, it offers breathtaking landscapes, between sea and mountains - including Diamond Hill - and protects ecosystems of moorland and peat bogs.

Burren National Park : located in County Clare, it protects the ecosystems and picturesque landscapes of the Burren limestone plateau, shaped by grazing and dotted with megalithic sites.

Ballycroy National Park : located in County Mayo, it protects the remarkable ecosystems of the Great Owenduff Bog and the Nephin Beg mountain range.

Killarney National Park : located in County Kerry, it protects lakes, moors and forests rich in biodiversity, including a remarkable birdlife but also salmon and trout.

Glenveagh National Park : located in County Donegal, it shelters ecosystems of moors, peat bogs and forests and beautiful panoramas of valleys and mountains.

Wicklow Mountains National Park : located in counties Wicklow and Dublin, it protects a rich cultural and natural heritage, including moorland, forests and peatlands.

Shortcomings in water and waste management

Sewage treatment remains a significant issue in the country, where facilities are outdated or inadequate. In 2019, tap water no longer met drinking water standards in the Dublin region, where nearly 600,000 residents were banned from drinking it. Waste management is also inadequate, as is public awareness. The country is also one of the biggest consumers of plastic in Europe, mainly because of the over-packaging of food, a paradoxical situation in a country that was one of the first to implement actions against single-use plastic (tax on plastic bags in 2002).

Ireland's response to climate change

Ongoing climate change is already affecting Ireland with unusual extreme events such as Hurricane Ophelia in 2017. The frequency and intensity of hazards (storms, floods, droughts) could worsen as the century progresses. Ireland is also threatened by rising sea levels and coastal erosion. In the face of this, actions do not match words. In 2017, along with other European countries, Ireland was sued by an NGO for inaction on climate change. In 2020, the country's Supreme Court of Justice struck down the climate change plan for lack of specifics. According to the Climate Change Index, a ranking carried out by the NGO Germanwatch, Ireland is at the bottom of the list of European countries in the fight against climate change. The main reasons for this are the country's heavy dependence on fossil fuels and its agricultural model (livestock and fodder crops). In terms of progress, we note the vote in 2018 by the Irish Parliament of a bill to prohibit public investment in companies whose turnover is more than 20% linked to fossil fuels. When leaving for Ireland, travelers can use the country's rail network, or make their journey by bicycle thanks to the many existing cycling routes. Ireland is accessible by boat and crossed by a European cycle route, EuroVelo1, and there are cycle tourism operators. In 2020, the Minister for the Environment has decided to invest 360 million euros per year for the next five years in the development of active mobility (cycling and walking), which represents 20% of Ireland's budget. It should be noted that two thirds of this budget is dedicated to public transport.

The impact of data centers

Data centers are major contributors to global warming. They consume a lot of energy for data storage and also for air conditioning and building cooling systems. Ireland will have 54 data centers by 2020, with about 40 projects underway. According to the Irish Academy of Engineering, data centers could account for more than 30% of the country's energy consumption before 2030. While some of them are running on renewable energy or planning to recover heat from servers to heat homes, the issue of increasing energy demand remains important.

The pitfalls of replanting

For a long time covered by forests, Ireland was deforested to the point of having only 1% of forest left in 1928. The territory has been reforested since the 1970s (11% afforestation today), notably from monocultures of Sitka spruce, which originated in North America. However, these plantations are not forests. Forests are the result of a natural and slow process and are home to a rich biodiversity, whereas plantations are the result of human activity, often for commercial purposes, and are poor in biodiversity. Irish forestry, subsidized by the State, has as one of its objectives to fight against global warming. However, these plantations would have a rather negative environmental effect. On the one hand, they contribute to the development of "green deserts" to the detriment of meadows and peatlands. On the other hand, the effect of mitigating global warming would be null. A study in the journal Nature

published in 2018 highlights that conifers, darker than hardwoods, have the effect of reducing the albedo effect, and moreover clear-cutting contributes to lower carbon storage capacities. However, there are initiatives to reforest former peatland sites with local species including hardwoods. In terms of global warming mitigation, scientists are also interested in the potential of peatlands (a quarter of the country's surface) and their capacity to store carbon.