Ms Sadhbh O'Neill:

I will briefly respond to the challenge from Deputy Bruton on carbon farming. I was being critical of carbon offsetting. Conceptually, we need to be extremely careful about how we deploy that concept and ensure that schemes we put together or claims we make stand up scientifically. The idea of carbon farming is that it is more of a mechanism to measure the emissions and removals in a very site-specific way.

The same challenges are going to arise in respect of measurement and verification. I am not saying that we should not explore it. We need to have this information for our own reporting purposes. However, it seems to me that we still sometimes neglect the low-hanging fruit, which is addressing the bulging livestock herd numbers. That could be a much cheaper than some of the other measures proposed. Setting up any kind of carbon trading scheme is extremely expensive. It is very expensive to set something up that can be rigorous and verifiable with regard to an international or even voluntary carbon standard.

We could be looking at the elephant in the room instead, which is the forestry sector. We have a very low level of forest cover in Ireland and very little in the way of agroforestry. There is great potential for farmers to engage in more sustainable approaches to forestry and afforestation than we have seen in the past few decades. This will be particularly important because a lot of what commercial forestry we do have will become ready for harvest in the middle of the 2020s, which suggests that there may be a loss of carbon during that period. We need to greatly ramp up our rates of afforestation but also to use this as an opportunity to enhance biodiversity and nature-based solutions rather than undermining them with the monoculture approach, which has unfortunately been detrimental to water quality and biodiversity in many places. The climate action plan recommended a target of 6,500 ha of planting by 2025 but it does not look likely that this will be achieved. That will have an impact on our inventory and our emissions reporting. From a policy point of view, we should focus on areas in which we can make the quickest and cheapest gains that are sustainable. This is definitely an area at which the committee could look in the future.