Dr. Rogier Schulte:

With regard to incentivising afforestation, in the study we are doing, accelerating the afforestation rate is one of the pathways we are investigating and it is one that looks promising. The crucial issue with afforestation is that it works like compound interest. The earlier we start, the more credits we will achieve by 2050. It is crucial that we do not wait for ten years because it will be much more difficult to close the emissions gap by 2050.

With regard to the question of whether enough is being done internationally, there is a great deal of activity in the research area and in research policy interaction but I am confident that in Ireland we are ahead of the curve. We are collaborating and playing a key role in many international research policy initiatives and trying to co-ordinate the activities between countries, including through the FACCE JPI and the Global Research Alliance, GRA. We are the second country in the world, to the best of our knowledge, to publish a marginal abatement cost curve, which shows the options for agriculture. The UK published a year earlier and France and the Netherlands are creating them at the moment. When I presented last week to the livestock research group of the GRA, I was approached by scientists from South America who have been instructed by the UN to also create these cost curves for agriculture in that region. They were seeking our advice on how to go about that. We are, therefore, ahead of the curve but other countries are active and are catching up.