Dr. Rogier Schulte:

First, let me apologise for the absence of Professor Gerry Boyle, the director of Teagasc, who has been unable to attend this meeting. We have prepared a short statement which I will read out, if I may.

My name is Rogier Schulte and I chair the Teagasc working group on greenhouse gas emissions. I am accompanied by Mr. Trevor Donnellan, principal research officer at the Teagasc rural economy research centre. We would like to thank the committee for giving us an opportunity to speak here today, specifically on the subject of agriculture and greenhouse gas, or greenhouse gas, emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions touch on all aspects of farming: soil science, animal science, plant science and economics. For this reason, Teagasc instigated a special working group in 2009 to co-ordinate all research and advisory activities relating to greenhouse gases. Reflecting on the past five years, we have been witness and party to a remarkable transformation in the national policy discussions on agriculture and climate change. Today, we would like to share that transformation with the committee.

We have documented this in three major reports. The first two of these are available on our website, while we are currently finalising the third report which will be available at the end of this summer.

In 2011, we published our first report, entitled "Obstacles to Reducing GHG Emissions from Agriculture", as a submission to the proposed Climate Change Response Bill of the previous Government. This draft legislation proposed a 20% reduction for Ireland's non-ETS sector by 2020 in line with EU policy. In our submission, we highlighted the difficulties that would result from a 20% quota-type reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Specifically, we demonstrated that this national strategy could result in carbon leakage. Indeed, Irish livestock production systems are among the most carbon efficient in the world. A unilateral reduction in livestock production in Ireland would contrast sharply with the growing global demand for livestock produce. This could indeed act as an inadvertent stimulus for less efficient production systems in other regions of the world. The overall result would be an increase in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, we demonstrated that the current IPCC inventory methodology for agriculture is inadvertently constructed in such a way that many actions that Irish farmers could take to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions would not be credited to the agricultural sector. Instead, they would be credited to the energy sector, the transport sector, or the anonymous land use, land use change and forestry, LULUCF, sector.

In 2012, we challenged ourselves in consultation with the National Economic and Social Council. If a 20% quota-type reduction in agricultural emissions is undesirable, then what can be done in agriculture to further reduce the carbon footprint of Irish agriculture? To answer this question, in our second report, entitled "A Marginal Abatement Cost Curve for Irish Agriculture", we collated ten years of research on greenhouse gas emissions into a marginal abatement cost curve. This ranks the options open to agriculture by cost effectiveness and by the magnitude of the various mitigation measures.

This report came to the following three conclusions: first, the total potential cost-effective reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture amounts to about 2.5 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents. However, less than half of that can be counted and accredited to the agricultural sector. Second, in practice this means that, at best, the Food Harvest 2020 production targets can be achieved while flat-lining greenhouse gas emissions, which would be a significant achievement in its own right; and, third, the most cost-effective measures are those based on further increases in farm efficiency. These measures require incentivisation. To aid this we developed, together with Bord Bia, the carbon navigator. The navigator advises individual farms which of the cost-effective measures are most appropriate on that farm.

Following intensive consultation with NESC, the findings of our submission featured strongly in the NESC interim report for 2020. For their final report, which specifies a vision for the year 2050, NESC set us a constructive new challenge: carbon-neutrality for Irish agriculture as a horizon point. No longer bound by the straitjacket of IPCC reporting rules, this vision would allow agriculture to offset its emissions of methane and nitrous oxide by carbon sequestration in soils.

In response to this challenge, we are currently assessing the feasibility of carbon-neutrality as a horizon point in our third report, entitled "Pathways towards Carbon Neutral Agriculture as a Horizon Point for 2050". Our preliminary figures suggest that in a business-as-usual scenario, about one third of agricultural emissions will be offset by carbon sequestration in soils, leaving an emissions gap equating to two thirds of the emissions.

We are currently assessing the feasibility of five contrasting pathways to close this emissions gap. These are accelerated afforestation; bio-energy production, including anaerobic digestion; advanced mitigation technologies; constrained agricultural activity; and passive acceptance of the emissions gap. We are analysing all the pros and cons of each of these pathways individually. We will publish the results of this study by the end of this summer. The likely outcome is that a combination of more than one approach may be required to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

We are advancing plans to try these measures and pathways on a major new demonstration farm at Kildalton College, which is our main training college for farmers, starting from next year as a sustainability demonstration farm.

We would like to thank and acknowledge our partners throughout this process and transformation, specifically the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, the National Economic and Social Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Earth Institute at University College Dublin.