When it comes to trees, Ireland has deep roots. Forests once covered a massive 80% of Ireland’s land surface and there were laws protecting certain trees. Characters in early Medieval Irish alphabets were named after native trees and who would want to cut down a Hawthorn tree for fear of angering the faeries? But today, forests only cover 11% of the country. With a drive to increase that figure to 18% by 2050, the government view forests as an essential element to achieving net zero emissions by 2050… but is 18% of Irish land enough? And as we still need timber for construction and furniture making, how do we balance our forestry needs?

We often associate old age with wrinkles, increased frailty and a giant pill box. But we need to challenge that! Growing old is a fact of life; unhealthy ageing isn’t. In this episode, we examine how nutrition can help reduce age-related loss of muscle mass and strength, thereby reducing frailty. We’ll hear about the causes of delirium and meet the researchers who want to raise awareness of the condition within healthcare to help reduce misdiagnoses with dementia. Finally, we investigate a disease that is so prevalent you could fill Croke Park with the people in Ireland who suffer from it. Age-related Macular Degeneration, or AMD, is the leading cause of blindness in Ireland. We catch up with the researchers who are working to find the causes of this disease and hope to develop cures for it.

When choosing where we want to live, we usually ask questions such as, how far you are to the local shops, whether there are any good schools nearby or if it’s a long and arduous commute to the workplace. We rarely consider how the environment around where we live could affect our health. In this episode, it’s all about Location, Location, Location.

Fungi are an ancient form of life, existing long before the first amphibians, reptiles or mammals roamed the planet. There are estimated to be well over 1 million species of fungi worldwide – some can be poisonous and destroy trees, others can be very healthy to eat or can help crops absorb nutrients. Despite several mass extinction events, fungi are the one form of life that always survive, and in this episode, Jonathan investigates what ancient fungi can tell us about historical climate events and how studying them might help us predict what will happen in our planet’s future due to climate change.

The ocean is our planet’s biggest and most important ally against climate change, playing a key role in regulating and redistributing heat, as well as storing large amounts of heat and carbon. In this episode, we investigate the Atlantic Ocean conveyor belt that moves warm water north and maintains Ireland’s mild climate, check out the latest Irish research monitoring changes in the Gulfstream and Jonathan meet the scientists at Met Éireann who are using supercomputers to produce climate models that are essential to understanding the ongoing impacts of the climate emergency.