Minister Hackett welcomes €34M funding for lasting impact on Ireland’s approach to biodiversity data

Minister Pippa Hackett has welcomed Minister Malcolm Noonan's announcement today of funding of €34 million for a new LIFE Strategic Nature Project, Ireland’s largest LIFE Nature Project.

Led by the NPWS and supported by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Coillte Nature, this ambitious nine-year project will bring biodiversity information from multiple sources together to enable enhanced decision-making and support better tracking of progress towards targets. It is expected to have a lasting impact on how we plan, fund and deliver action for nature across Ireland.

Minister Hackett said: “This funding of €34 million has the potential to take biodiversity policy in Ireland to the next level. Over the past number of years, we have implemented a number of results-based programmes through which farmers are paid for improvements in on-farm biodiversity, across EIPs, LIFE projects and now ACRES. The advisory and scoring work in these programmes is labour intensive, with huge amounts of really valuable data collected as part of that work.

This nine-year project will allow us to make the most of those incredibly rich information stores, and use that data more effectively so that we can better understand trends, identify conservation priorities in an even more focused way, and develop more targeted strategies and policies for protection and restoration.”

Minister Noonan said:

“It’s all very well setting ambitious targets for nature, but unless we have reliable information from a wide range of sources, we can’t know if we’re being effective. This exciting €34 million project will transform Ireland’s approach to biodiversity data and help us track progress towards key policy goals in a transparent, public-facing way.

It will also support better decision-making for nature protection and restoration, and open up new opportunities for how we resource this work. Led by the National Parks and Wildlife Service of my Department, this project promises to be a hugely positive initiative that will enhance our national capacity to deliver real impact for nature and, crucially, to demonstrate the value of that work.”