Mr. Paddy Purser:

Senator O’Reilly’s question regarding a silver standard is a difficult one to answer. There are many different types of woodland. If the priority is promoting biodiversity, native woodlands are definitely the area to prioritise. The difficulty is on the economic side. We are asking private landowners to deliver the forestry programme and many are planting native woodland. I planted 11 new native woodlands this year on behalf of private owners. That is a major gesture on their part for the country and there is no economic reason for doing so. That is the difficulty. That is why when we talk about forest management we try to talk about delivering sustainably on all three of the cornerstones, namely, ecology, economics and the social aspect of sustainable forestry. There are different systems. The CCF system is able to deliver to those functions in a balanced way. We continue timber production through harvesting timber and selling it to the timber industries but by not clear-cutting the forests, we are retaining the forest ecosystem, allowing it to evolve and develop, and storing and locking carbon the whole time.

As regards a bronze standard, as I indicated in a previous answer, there are circumstances where it is not possible to transform a plantation forest in the current rotation. It would need to be felled using best felling practices and then redesigned, restructured and replanted. That applies to many of the forests in this country, which are simply not possible to transform.

On the question on soils, I would refer to my presentation and some of the legacy issues. The way we invest in the soils that are suitable for forestry is by planting them in a diverse way. Planting a monoculture does not respect the soil because one ends up with a very simple structure beneath the ground and that is not good. A diverse structure is needed underground as well as overground and that is what the soil will indicate and benefit from. It is not through any action we do directly with the soil but through the secondary benefit of having diverse species planted on the soil.