Mr. Jonathan Church:

Yes, certainly. I will be brief. The questioner absolutely has a good point that there will be important expertise among the ex officio members and that they represent important perspectives. The UK Committee on Climate Change, through being suitably resourced and empowered and in the way it has acted, has always had all the expertise it needs whether it is working with different institutions, bodies and with civil society. It is an active and outward facing body that gets and has good access to all of the relevant analyses and information it needs and all of the capacity it has in house, as Dr. Muinzer has mentioned. It is not, therefore, so important to have, as it were, certain perspectives represented in the committee itself. It may well be that the CCC does have experts on the committee in agriculture, for example, or in biomass, economics or behavioural science to bring their expertise, but there might not be. There may not be people with specific representations on bodies such as Teagasc, for example, and on other similar bodies. One can get that expertise and those perspectives without necessarily having it set up with ex officiomembers.

On the dual targets, it is my sense that it does make sense to have different targets for long-lived greenhouse gasses and short-lived gasses like methane, particularly when agriculture emissions are such a large part of the challenge here. All that is required is real clarity between those two targets. Again, I am conscious that we do not want to overpack the law, but having clarity on that and having those two targets could well be valuable. I understand that the short-lived greenhouse gasses like methane do not actually have to come right down to zero in order to have no impact on climate and global temperatures. There is a potentially important way here for Ireland to become climate neutral without necessarily having to get its methane right down to zero. I do not mean to be unambitious but I mentioned it because it could be as legitimate a way of driving the transition to be climate neutral in a way that is more suitable to Ireland's circumstances. We have mentioned New Zealand's Act, which goes some way in that direction, but perhaps not as far as it could do.