A range of local and international businesses are to fund a new pilot biodiversity project aimed at making farming for nature sustainable and scalable.
ReFarm is a five-year collaboration between Trinity College Dublin, Burrenbeo Trust and a range of firms.
These include RWE Ireland, John Paul Construction, CIE Tours, BiOrbic, Trinity Business School, Community Foundation Ireland and an impact investor.
The project will fund the creation and management of wildlife ponds, hedgerows, woodlands and species-rich grasslands on a number of Irish farms.
So far the initiative has raised more than €1m in funding for the farm based work and for a research programme that will accompany it.
“Engaging with farmers to restore biodiversity on their farms has the greatest potential for positive change. At the same time businesses want to invest in nature,” said Professor Jane Stout, Professor of Ecology and Vice President For Biodiversity and Climate Action at Trinity College Dublin.
“ReFarm brings together the farming community and private sector investors to provide critical funding for farmers to restore nature on their land, and a mechanism to scale this up,” she added.
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“Many of the agri-environmental schemes to date have been publicly funded,” said Dr Martha O’Hagan, associate professor of finance at TCD and co-principal investigator at ReFarm. “The scale of the challenge is so much that we need private sector funding as well as public sector funding.”
During its first two years, Trinity will carry out a research programme to examine long-term funding structures for businesses to invest in nature-positive actions on Irish farms.
That will include identifying a way for participating companies to report the nature-positive actions under new EU sustainability reporting directives.
“Part of what the research that will be done during this pilot will look to do is to make a structure that businesses can report on,” said Dr O’Hagan. “What we want to do is create a product that companies can easily report on.”
Engagement with farmers will also be key – but Dr Brendan Dunford, founder of BurrenBeo Trust, says there is no shortage of enthusiasm on the ground.
“We are convinced that there are enough farmers and funders out there who really want to act now to enhance farmland biodiversity,” he said.
“Project ReFarm will mobilise and connect these parties, and then learn from this engagement, so that we can build a brighter future for nature and for farming in Ireland.”