The Irish Natura and Hill Farmers Association says governments and MEP's should scrap the proposed Nature Restoration Law following a series of inconclusive votes on it at EU Parliament level.
President of the association Vincent Roddy says the law will undermine farming activity and food production and will destroy rural communities.
A final committee vote on the law was pushed back until June 27th after an amendment to reject it resulted in a split vote last Thursday.
The proposed legislation would oblige EU countries to come up with national plans to restore ecosystems and habitats, including re wetting up to 20% of land across the EU.
Speaking on the Let's Talk show today, Vincent Roddy says some reports carried out here already have shown that the re-wetted areas could in fact produce more methane and could adversely affect climate change.
He says much more study is needed to evaluate how re-wetting would work here before any law is adopted…
'What they have found is that they re-wet those peat lands, what happens is that yes, you might see a reduction in the amount of carbon.
But what happens is you see the levels of methane take off. Definitely from a climate change point of view, methane is far more potent than carbon is in raising temperatures.
So in actual fact, this is not going to deliver on what it needs. When we look at this we need to make sure that the science is relevant to Ireland and the land type, and this is not the case.'
