By: Aoife Haines

As Community Conversations, Minister Christopher O’Sullivan’s initiative which invited public contributions to Ireland’s Nature Restoration Plan, drew to a close at the end of 2025, it underscored what has long been evident: Traditional and Local Ecological Knowledge (TEK/LEK) remains largely absent from the frameworks that inform Irish climate policy. 

Under Brehon Law, Ireland’s primary legal system until the seventeenth-century English colonial conquest, harming a tree carried penalties not dissimilar to those for harming a person. Passed down orally for centuries, the law reflects a worldview in which the human and the non-human (more-than-human) were not so distinct; a worldview largely lost today. 

Brehon Law provides an example of TEK in Ireland. Defined by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) as “knowledge, know-how, skills and practices that are […] passed on from generation to generation within a community, often forming part of its cultural or spiritual identity”, traditional knowledge generally involves a reciprocal relationship between a community and their local environment. TEK is often – and incorrectly – defined against ‘scientific’, empirical ways of knowing, and was devalued and dismissed under the throes of colonialism and mass industrialisation, historically resulting in devastating ecological effects. 

For instance, the fires that California has recently suffered have been caused by the loss of indigenous fire stewardship over the past two centuries. Native tribes in the area used fire as a land management tool to cultivate the biodiversity that made the landscape more resilient. European settlers regarded the practice as primitive and did not understand its importance in the ecosystem, outlawing planned burns in 1850. Forest biomass in areas like the Klamath Mountains region is approximately double what it used to be, resulting in the devastating fires seen today.

TEK holds the missing key to restoring a connection between us and the natural world, and to aligning governance more closely with its needs – but only if policy learns to listen.

Globally, policymakers are beginning to recognise the value of TEK. Prescribed burns have been somewhat reintegrated into land management practices across the US through programmes such as the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network. At the UN climate change conference, COP27, the Global Goal on Adaptation under Article 7 of the Paris Agreement, called for climate adaptation approaches that “take into account the best available science, and the worldviews and values of Indigenous Peoples”.

In fact, in 2024, a briefing by the European Parliamentary Research Service on climate change and cultural heritage commended Ireland as one of seven countries effectively co-ordinating their policies in these areas. While not identical, traditional knowledge falls under the umbrella of cultural and ecological heritage. Ireland sees initiatives such as the Fingal Heritage X Climate Project, which employs citizen science to measure the effects of climate change on Fingal’s heritage sites. Similarly, the Royal Irish Academy’s conference on Exploring Climate Change and Culture and Heritage in 2023, “aimed to highlight the profound effects of climate change on Ireland’s cultural legacy”. 

However, while important, these projects aim to protect heritage from climate breakdown, rather than recognising the potential of using heritage as a tool for climate action. In turn, the Royal Irish Academy’s conference concluded on a future-facing note, underscoring “the need to draw lessons from the cultural heritage sector to inform environmental conservation efforts across the island of Ireland”.

Despite these insights, Ireland’s Climate Action Plan 2025 largely fails to recognise this intersection and further entrenches a divide, rather than a reciprocity, between humans and nature in its approach.

In the Plan, local ecological knowledge continues to be marginalised, with technocratic solutions to climate breakdown reigning over participatory ones. 

For example, by endorsing Coillte’s Forest Estate Strategic Land-Use Plan, Ireland’s Climate Action Plan continues to allow monoculture afforestation with the non-native Sitka spruce, despite just under 2% of the country being covered in native woodland. These forestry plantations are championed as a carbon sink, allowing Ireland to meet EU-mandated reduction targets in greenhouse gas emissions on paper, while rendering invisible the wildlife loss experienced by the communities and animals who live within them. 

Within most climate policy, Ireland’s land is still valued for its economic potential over its ecological diversity, failing to systemically challenge the worldview that led to, and justified, these extractive practices in the first place: the superiority of humans over nature – a worldview which many indigenous groups do not hold.

Even in the Plan’s projections on Citizen Engagement – which intend to focus on community-based initiatives such as the Climate Actions Work Training Programme – proposals to provide training for community groups overshadow the possibility for locally emergent practices to gain traction.

If Ireland’s Climate Action Plan 2025 reveals anything, it is a continued disconnect between us and the living systems we depend on. Where the Plan promises “climate policy, action and implementation […] strengthened by identification of new evidence, technologies and solutions”, it is equally important to integrate relational ways of knowing and community-led knowledge into policy-informing frameworks alongside these technologies. Only then can future policy better reflect the needs of Ireland’s natural world and recognise our interdependence with it.

Across Ireland, communities are already demonstrating how local and traditional knowledge can inform climate action.

Nature restoration charity Hometree’s project, Dinnseanchas, involves a “deep mapping” of the Irish landscape that integrates “local knowledge, values, perceptions and visions and including those as valuable layers to develop a more complete picture of a place”. Its initiative provides a model for the integration of relational, lived experience into technology that could hold the potential for informing future climate policy.

Similarly, Dublin City Council’s Bram Stoker Festival closed its four-day celebration on November 2^nd 2025, with the spectacular Macnas Parade, which explored how “our culture, memory and climate intertwine”. The parade placed the figure of the corncrake, which now faces global ecocide, centre stage. Once “the soundtrack of Irish summers, now a vanished voice from our fields”, it called for awareness of the ecological – and cultural – cost of intensive farming. Designed by Galway-based theatre company, Macnas, the parade highlighted the absence of community sentiment in national policy.

Without visibility in government plans, resistance to destructive farming and forestry practices falls to groups like Hometree and Macnas, even as research shows the feasibility of implementing more regenerative, nature-based systems. 

As Ireland rolls out its Nature Restoration Plan in 2026, the nationwide Community Conversations saw a strong turnout throughout the latter half of 2025, reflecting not only enthusiasm for ecological renewal, but growing frustration at public exclusion from environmental decision-making.

Efforts such as Community Conversations mark a promising start, but token consultation is not participation.

Climate Action Plan 2026 approaches, and as Ireland prepares, the importance of integrating local and traditional knowledge into governance strategies must not be overlooked. Ireland’s own history, from the relational ecology embedded in Brehon Law to the community-led movements today, reminds us that the voices of those most affected by the climate crisis must be visible in our mitigation, adaptation and restoration strategies. The management of natural resources must be more democratic, participatory, and ultimately attuned to the ecosystems we are part of.