Our waterways are in crisis. Only about 1% of Ireland’s rivers and streams are pristine; down from nearly 15% in the 1980s. Despite a legal obligation to achieve “good” status for our waterways by 2027, we’ve hovered around only 55% of waterways at this status since 1987. The targets aren’t just to keep within EU law; they are essential to being rebuilding habitat for vulnerable aquatic wildlife and for helping support Irish biodiversity and for our own water quality needs. So if we’ve tried for nearly 30 years to achieve improvements in water quality with essentially zero success, why should…
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Our waterways are in crisis. Only about 1% of Ireland’s rivers and streams are pristine; down from nearly 15% in the 1980s. Despite a legal obligation to achieve “good” status for our waterways by 2027, we’ve hovered around only 55% of waterways at this status since 1987. The targets aren’t just to keep within EU law; they are essential to rebuilding habitat for vulnerable aquatic wildlife and for helping support Irish biodiversity and for our own water quality needs. So if we’ve tried for nearly 30 years to achieve improvements in water quality with essentially zero success, why should we…
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Video from Feidhlim’s talk at the recent Skerries Eco Night – Turning the Tide Together – what can we do; Sept 28th 2024. Slides to this event are below:
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Here’s a copy of a presentation given recently in Knocklyon, Dublin with the report underneath:
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Féidhlim Harty explains how to maximise the potential for biodiversity in your next stormwater management project First published in Horticulture Connected on April 3, 2020 (link below). Flood control is very much on the agenda in this period of climate consciousness; fuelling an increase in planning requirements for Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) across Ireland. But the ecological benefits of SuDS go far beyond flood mitigation; they engage in carbon sequestration and biodiversity habitat creation as well. How can we use SuDS as a springboard to maximise the ecological benefits of the developments we work on? Two questions can act as…
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First published in Horticulture Connected on November 7, 2019 Feidhlim Harty explains why we need to see greater use of swales in the Irish landscape The incorporation of swales to mitigate the negative impacts of rainwater runoff in designed schemes is not new. However, their use in Ireland has really only taken off in the last decade. In this feature, I look at how a variety of development and environmental pressures are spurring a huge interest in the design and incorporation of swales in designed landscapes, and how best they can be used. Have you ever wondered how we got…
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Published for Feasta on 19th Sept 2014 (https://www.feasta.org/2014/09/19/sustainable-water-use/) Like many things in modern life, the vast majority of our current water and wastewater infrastructure is completely dependant upon fossil energy to keep the toilets flushed and the taps running. Even the word “wastewater” itself assumes that we have no better use for the water that we flush out of our homes or the nutrients and biomass it contains than to dump it. In a truly sustainable society, “sewage” would be a word of the past, and we would begin to hear terms not typically used in today’s media like “humanure”…