CURRENTLY OPEN FOR PUBLIC CONSULTATION – HAVE YOUR SAY!
Ireland’s third River Basin Management Plan is currently under development and is open for public consultation. River Basin Management Plans are pivotal tools for the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive. The Water Framework Directive is European legislation that requires our rivers, lakes, groundwater and coastal water to achieve a healthy state, or what’s known as ‘good ecological status’.Ireland’s first RBMP was published in 2009, the second was published in 2018, and the third RBMP due to cover the period 2022-2027 is in the process of being finalised. But what does all of this mean?
THE TREE MAY BE DEAD BUT ITS WOOD STILL SUPPORTS LIFE
“Dead wood provides one of the two or three greatest resources for animal species in a natural forest ecosystem,” says Charles Elton in ‘The Pattern of Animal Communities’. Although it is quite often removed in an effort to keep things tidy and make space for living trees, dead wood is actually a vital element in woodland ecosystems. Wood decomposition is one of a woodland’s essential recycling processes and a natural part of every tree’s lifecycle. Dead and decaying wood also provides a nutrient-rich habitat for fungi, a nursery for beetle larvae and a larder for insectivorous birds and other animals. Incredibly, forests worldwide produce and decompose 150 billion tonnes of wood every year!This article is adapted from an article by the Woodland Trust that can be found on their website (www.woodlandtrust.co.uk).
It’s well understood that the ever increasing demand for goods and services is fueling climate breakdown. Yet despite this advertisers go to extreme expense to convince us to spend more and more. That’s why activists and campaigners of all kinds are heaping pressure on the advertising industry (and the biggest polluters) to clean up their act. Dermot McNally investigates.
WHY ARE THEY IMPORTANT AND WHAT’S HAPPENING TO THEM?
Greenland (near the North Pole) and Antarctica (South Pole) are home to most of the world’s glacial ice, including its only two ice sheets. Glaciers and ice sheets have been appearing in the news quite frequently in the past few years as they are increasingly unstable due to global warming. Just before Christmas it was reported that the Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic, which is the widest glacier in the world and is sometimes referred to as the ‘Doomsday Glacier’, could collapse in as little as five years. Candice Moen has a closer look at our earth’s ice.
THE HISTORY OF ICE ON EARTH
There have been many ice ages on earth, most of them long before humans made their first appearance. These ice ages would have ranged from “comparatively mild” to “so severe that the entire Earth froze over for tens or even hundreds of millions of years”. Looking back over the history of these ice ages, the planet seems to have three main settings: ‘greenhouse’, when tropical temperatures extend to the poles and there are no ice sheets at all; ‘icehouse’, when there is some permanent ice, although its extent varies greatly; and ‘snowball’, in which the planet’s entire surface is frozen over. During the different greenhouse, icehouse and snowball there was ice present in various different locations across the earth’s surface.
Transition Monaghan 