Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It seems to me that Mr. Lucas's Department has a lot of work to do.

The presentation Dr. Renou-Wilson gave was the most inspiring, insightful, important and, at the same time, frightening I have heard given before the committee. I find her evidence absolutely incredible, in both senses of the word, in terms of the scale of both the problem we face and the opportunity we have. The problem and the truly frightening part is her closing section, where she noted the susceptibility of our depleted boglands to become a real problem in the event of climate change, where we will see them drying out and subject to fire and further degradation. The inspiring parts are the sense of opportunity, as I understand it, and the scale of emissions abatement, or the stopping of emissions, we could achieve if Mr. Lucas and his colleagues were to get their skates on and take some action. I note that Dr. Renou-Wilson is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2006 guidelines on wetlands. I am very much interested in hearing her answer to the following question.

The degradation of our boglands accounts for 11 million tonnes of carbon per year, which is equivalent to the entirety of emissions from our energy sector. If we were to give Mr. Lucas 100 assistants and colleagues, make budget a non-issue and provide every resource possible to rewet, rewild and rehabilitate, how many of those 11 tonnes of emissions could be removed from the equation by the end of the next decade?