New project to explore value of biodiversity actions on farms

The value of biodiversity actions on the average Irish farm and their value to society is to be explored in a new research project.

The Farming Resilience and Management through Natural Capital (FARM-NC) project received over €325,000 in the 2024 research call, which is co-funded by the Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to run over two years starting this March.

Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal, the project’s lead applicant, Dr Jimmy O’Keefe, assistant professor at Dublin City University (DCU), said that farmers and landowners are central to this approach, ensuring they are fairly supported.

“We’re very aware that farmers do a lot of good and can do a lot of good especially when it comes to the environment. This project is about coming up with a framework to measure that.

Aims

“Farming and farmland cover about 70% of the country so when it comes to the climate emergency and biodiversity, there’s no solution to this without farmers being on board.

“We’re very conscious that we’re not the experts, it’s the farmers that are the experts.”

Extreme weather events pose a threat to Ireland’s landscape through environmental degradation, including biodiversity loss, falling water quality, and property damage which the researchers believe are exacerbated by changing land use practices and the intensification of food production.

Mitigating these impacts has involved public and private sector spending, which has placed an increasing financial burden on taxpayers.

This project aims to enhance farm-level sustainability through a natural capital accounting (NCA) framework that integrates data collection, accounting frameworks, and participatory stakeholder engagement. NCA identifies, measures, and tracks natural resource stocks vital for life and involves understanding the condition of key environmental assets and quantifying the flow of ecosystem services.

“Skills, workforce, reputation, experience, knowledge; these are all forms of capital. From all of these, we get benefits,” added O’Keefe.

“Natural capital is the same thing; it’s about farming nature in a way that everybody understands. In some ways it’s an economic metaphor for nature.”

Three study sites representing small to medium-sized farms will be used, focusing on those that have undertaken or are undertaking ecosystem service improvements. The researchers have selected three beef and/or mixed-use farms in the south of the country for the project.

They will employ drones, carbon measurement, rapid ecological assessments, and hydrological evaluation as part of collecting data for their analysis.

“We’ll be using drones to measure the extent and condition of some of the land that’s there and how that land use changes over time. The drones are very useful because they allow for very high-resolution images to be generated very quickly and very cheaply.”

“Ultimately, this is about providing both the farmer with more information to help them make better, more informed decisions but also to provide, for example, the Department of Agriculture with additional information that could help them support farmers down the road.”

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