Mr. Andrew Jackson:

On Senator Higgins' question about the role of the Climate Change Advisory Council, it would be valuable for the advisory council to advise not just on what the overall budget should be but also on potential opportunities within different sectors etc. That is the sort of role it is performing at present; giving advice in its annual reports on things it thinks ought to be done. That is definitely worth looking at further.

On the question of biodiversity and better implementation of existing law, I think there are two prongs to it. The first is to look at the idea I suggested earlier of getting a general obligation relating to biodiversity and applying to all public bodies into section 15 of this Bill. It is absolutely right that a key piece of the jigsaw is better implementation of existing biodiversity obligations, because a lot of work needs to be done there. Forestry is one area where we really need to strengthen the implementation of biodiversity law but also to look generally at impact assessment law and how the environmental impact assessment, EIA, directive is operating. That is relevant to climate and biodiversity, because at present, we are not doing environmental impact assessments of forestry plantations. Therefore, we are not considering in any detail the question of whether a particular forest actually will sequester carbon over its lifetime or rather, whether it will be a persistent source of carbon, because, for example, it is planted on peat soils. There are some really important issues there.

On Senator O'Reilly's question on interaction between interim targets and climate budgets, on looking at the different legislative frameworks, some of them use both. It is not that they have picked one or the other because there is a symbiotic relationship between targets and budgets. Interestingly, in the evidence given before the committee last week by the departmental official, it is clear that there is a symbiotic relationship, because the Department official said that the first two budgets to be proposed by the Climate Change Advisory Council need to be within the framework of the programme for Government, which is a 7% average per annum. That is an example of the setting of a target by policy, albeit not in law, and asking for budgets that are compatible with that policy.

I might just come back to Senator Boylan's point on justiciability, because I did not have the chance to say anything about that and I meant to. It is very clear to me, as a former drafting lawyer, that the language in the Bill has been crafted with a view to making legal accountability more difficult. In some respects, that has happened between the heads of the Bill of 2019 and the current text. What intervened in the meantime? The Supreme Court's judgment in Climate Case Ireland. I pointed to examples in my opening statement of where that has happened, but it is clear that an attempt has been made here to make this Bill less justiciable. However, I believe that is counterproductive because reducing emissions is what is needed. We need to reduce emissions and pursue a just transition in a way that is compatible with restoring, enhancing and conserving biodiversity. Consequently, making the Act litigation-proof is not the way to achieve those things.