Professor John Sweeney:

In response to Senator Higgins, the climate change advisory committee has an important role to play. At present, it has no role to play in the setting of sectoral budgets, for example. It is all done by the Minister. It might be considered obligatory for the Minister to consult with the Climate Change Advisory Council and ascertain whether the sectoral budgets being proposed are consistent with the overall national carbon budget. This would also lead into the issue of interim targets. The role of the CCAC could well be to look at the annual progress towards achieving carbon budgets and to make a statement on it, which would have to be taken seriously by the Minister and Government of the day. It would be a very powerful thing. The original model for the CCAC was supposed to be the Fiscal Advisory Council and that is a model we still could impose upon the Bill in terms of the CCAC. It is a question of whether we are on track.

Many public bodies have annual values. They have a glide path to achieve, for example, in energy efficiency. I do not think it would be incompatible to have in this area annual targets and glide paths to follow in terms of whether we are on track. The CCAC could have an important role in making statements on this, which would be important to emphasise.

In response to Deputy Whitmore's observation on nature-based solutions, it is true we have a jigsaw of policies to handle and we have not done very well in terms of protecting our water courses, biodiversity or air quality. We have also been exceeding our obligations in ammonia in recent years.

All the pieces of this jigsaw somehow must be brought into the climate Act, not in terms of specifically mentioning each one but by giving the framework whereby they can be tackled by a proactive Department to achieve end products in these areas. That is all I would say. There is an issue in respect of carbon neutrality and at what level do we achieve carbon neutrality, be that high emission, high sequestration or low emission, low sequestration. These are also important issues. I would not like us to see the high emission, high sequestration model because I have doubts about the validity of sequestration achieving its ends in those areas. Therefore, we probably should flesh out what we mean by carbon neutrality.