IS IRELAND READY FOR BEAVERS?

We are postgraduate students in UCD’s innovation academy, studying Design Thinking for Sustainability. We recently completed a project exploring the many issues with river water quality in Ireland. As this was a theoretical project, we had the freedom to use ‘blue-sky thinking’ and landed on a radical solution: introducing beavers to Ireland in a controlled trial to measure their impact on flood mitigation and biodiversity. We expected a significant amount of pushback to our proposal, and, while some people expressed legitimate concerns, we were amazed at the level of support, from both ecological experts and private citizens.

Shockingly, since the 1980s, the number of Ireland’s ‘pristine’ rivers has fallen from 500 to just 20. Healthy rivers are a vital natural resource, supporting a vast range of species and habitats, while providing clean water for domestic, agricultural and industrial use, and supporting recreation and tourism. The quality of our rivers is also inextricably linked to our ability to manage the effects of climate change and address the biodiversity crisis.

One of the strengths of our multidisciplinary team - which might be surprising given the context - is that only one member has experience in ecology, with the rest coming from backgrounds in education, cultural studies and television. We tackled this challenge from every angle and benefited from having almost no preconceived ideas about the cause of the problem and why existing solutions did or did not work.

One of our earliest conclusions was the absolute necessity of minimising hard engineering projects as a solution to flooding. Changing the shape and flow of water bodies by physical alteration is the second highest cause, after agriculture, of loss of habitats and poor river water quality. In reality, finding a solution that utilises natural capital - the free services provided by nature - can be a more efficient and less resource intensive approach than even the most sophisticated human interventions.

Enter beavers - nature’s very own engineers! The Eurasian beaver was hunted to extinction in Britain 400 years ago and, although no evidence has (yet) been found that they reached Ireland, we know they evolved in a broadly similar habitat. Beaver dams modify habitats and landscapes through the creation of ponds and wetlands,

IS IRELAND READY FOR

BY AISLING BYRNE, SARAH JOHNSTON, ROB McCORMACK, FRAN MCNULTY

especially in hard-to-reach places. By storing large volumes of water, they can reduce the risk of rivers bursting their banks during heavy rain and rectify low flows during droughts as the leaking dams recharge streams. The dams can also filter silt and chemicals out of the water.

In the UK, a number of recent reintroduction trials have demonstrated many positive impacts including a significant improvement in biodiversity through to the restoration or creation of new ecosystems. In Cornwall, beavers’ dams slowed water flow rates from a few minutes to over an hour, while filtering pollutants in an area with heavy agricultural run-off.

The potential differences in cost is astounding. The Irish government has pledged over €100 million towards flood relief schemes in 2022, most of which will be spent on hard engineering. In Scotland, the cost of managing beavers in a 6,000km area for one year was £91,000.

This is not to suggest beavers are the solution to all our problems, only that they merit consideration as part of a toolkit of natural methods to improve water quality. There are many other factors to consider, from impacts on migratory fish to localised farmland damage, but the majority of people we spoke to were open to the idea of a trial, provided rigorous evaluation

Eurasian beaver

 Beaver dam near Stockholm, Sweden measures were in place. We had an offer of a potential host site and help to develop a working group and funding application - support beyond our wildest expectations! What appealed to people in particular was the speed at which beavers can regenerate degraded ecosystems, an essential factor in achieving significant change in the short window we have left.

It was this openness to the idea of naturebased solutions that surprised and encouraged us most. There is a growing shift in mindset towards working with, not against, nature to restore what we have lost and build resilience to face the challenges of the future. Whether beavers should be brought to Ireland is a debate for another day. What is not up for debate is the necessity of tackling the enormous climate and biodiversity crises we now face. We need to push ourselves beyond the boundaries of our chosen fields and build meaningful multidisciplinary collaborations that involve all voices. Now is the time for radical solutions. We are not experts but this project demonstrated the potential for anyone, regardless of background, to think big and put an idea out there. You might be surprised at the result!