Ella McSweeney: Nature restoration can slow floods and hold back wildfires. Fatalism is the enemy

Y ou don’t have to give a damn about nature to read the Climate Change Advisory Council’s annual biodiversity review, published last week, and feel concerned. It says we’re more exposed and vulnerable to floods, droughts, storms and wildfires because of the poor state of Ireland’s biodiversity. Nearly all of our protected habitats are, essentially, failing, and decades of draining peatlands and degrading wetlands have weakened the natural defences.

Local communities lose protections as habitats deteriorate. We have a proposed nature restoration plan, but the Government decided to allocate no dedicated funding to it in Budget 2027, so Ireland’s biodiversity and habitats will keep deteriorating. It feels like we’ll need to fasten our seat belts for what’s ahead. With just 9 per cent of our protected habitats improving, it’s easy to be stuck in stories of failure. But around the world, restoration is happening at record scale.

According to a United Nations report last month, about 252 million hectares are under restoration in 149 countries – the largest effort of its kind to date. The UN’s flagship restoration projects alone have created more than a million jobs, and more than 1.2 million people have been trained. Here are a few good news stories. Salmon are returning to Canadian rivers. For the past 16 years, Parks Canada has restored 65,000 hectares of land in river catchments and 22km of salmon rivers and streams across seven national parks, working closely with indigenous and local communities.

Salmon returns have increased at six of the seven sites, and the work has created more than 100 jobs. Restored peatland is slowing wildfires. In April last year, Natural Resources Wales reported that at Llyn Gorast in mid-Wales, where part of the peatland was rewetted in 2023, sphagnum pools acted as firebreaks during wildfires. In March 2026 the UK’s department for environment, food and rural affairs told parliament that sites in the Peak District, including The Roaches and Dove Stone, have become more resilient to wildfires as a result of restoration. [ Q&A: What is rewetting and why is it important?

Opens in new window ] Mangroves are growing again. A study in Science, published in June, used four decades of satellite data and found that global mangroves are no longer in net decline. It’s driven mainly by a mix of restoration and natural regrowth, including mangroves recolonising abandoned aquaculture ponds and spreading out into new coastal mudflats in river deltas. Since 2019, 450 residents of Corvo, the smallest island in the Azores, have come together each autumn to help ensure young Cory’s shearwaters make a successful first flight to sea.

They have switched off public lighting, such as street lights, so the fledglings aren’t fatally confused by the artificial light, and volunteers also patrol the village at night to find any grounded birds, which they release from a cliff the next day. In Puerto Rico, coral restoration is scaling up, with $5 million (€4.4 million) from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the largest single-site coral restoration project there.

The nonprofit Sea Ventures is restoring 30,000sq m of reef at Cayo Largo, and will plant 30,000 elkhorn corals in 60 sites between now and 2028. After the 2023-2024 marine heatwaves, natural and restored elkhorn fared much better than at some restoration sites in southwestern Puerto Rico, although scientists still aren’t sure why. [ A Pacific island ‘will be swallowed’ by the sea within decades. Is Ireland paying attention? Opens in new window ] Although it continues, Amazon deforestation is at a record low.

Brazil ’s space agency estimates that 3,335sq km of Amazon forest was cleared between August 2025 and July 2026, down 41.8 per cent from the previous year and the lowest since records began in 1988. Clearing in the Cerrado savannah is at the lowest since 2001. Between 1998 and 2002 in Malmo, Sweden , following repeated flooding from an overloaded sewer, a 30-hectare neighbourhood in Augustenborg was retrofitted with open channels, ponds, wetlands and green roofs.

The area was unaffected by a 50-year storm in 2007 that flooded much of the rest of Malmo, and a 2019 study of insurance claims from an extreme storm on August 31st, 2014, found less flood damage in Augustenborg than in five neighbouring areas. In Cumbria, a 2026 study found that flood waves typically took about 25 minutes longer to pass through a restored stretch of the stream Goldrill Beck, giving downstream communities more time to respond to moderate floods.

In 2021 the National Trust and the Environment Agency re-meandered a kilometre of the previously straightened, embanked stream and reconnected it to its floodplain. [ Sandymount flood defences: ‘If I was given the Lego, it’s what I would do’ Opens in new window ] In Ireland, the national restoration plan estimates about €33 billion in socioeconomic benefits between now and 2025, against just under €6 billion in costs, if the plan is funded and carried out.

The UN says that, by 2030, annual restoration finance must rise more than fourfold from $64 billion to $296 billion and that this could create up to 32 million new jobs. Restoration work is less exposed to AI than many office jobs – it’s people working in the field, building peat dams, clearing invasive species, rewetting bogs, building trusting relationships with farmers and landowners and working directly with local communities. Seat belts help you survive a crash; restoration is about steering fast away from one.

From Cumbria to Malmo, nature restoration has helped to slow floods and, in places, hold back fire. Whether Ireland gets these benefits in the future is a choice, not fate. It all comes down to one thing: whether restoration, at scale and with urgency, is properly funded.