By Louise Cullen, BBC News NI agriculture and environment correspondent
BBC
‘No entity who can improve health of lough’
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Nicholas Ashley-Cooper said the Estate’s Lough Neagh Ltd. company “has no control” over the water in the Lough and the nutrients that go into it.
He added that “collective action” was needed to find solutions to the issues facing the lough.
The earl describes the current situation of Lough Neagh as “deeply upsetting” and added that a charity or community trust model with rights of nature included as possibly “the best way” to support the Lough’s long-term future.
Dr Peter Doran, Senior Lecturer in Law, from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), said this is an “important development”.
“As an advocate of a rights of nature approach and community-ownership, I’m hopeful that other stakeholders, including the Executive, will now collaborate on a challenging transition, a just transition,” he said.
“The challenge is to re-imagine a novel community-led restoration in which the Lough itself and its multitude of life systems are meaningfully included as part of that rights-bearing community.”
He added: “The Lough is not a mere object for extraction and exploitation but a subject of our shared history.
“The new chapter must be one of collaboration, recognising that our fate as a community is deeply entangled with the fate of nature. We once knew this. It is time to embrace that insight once again.”
What are Rights of Nature?
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It is understood that the Lough Neagh Report commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs does not examine ownership of the Lough as part of the immediate solutions required.
The Executive discussed the report in its most recent meeting, and minister Andrew Muir has urged ministerial colleagues to approve it at the next meeting.
