Professor Kevin O'Connor:

The land use change we are going through represents an enormous transition and it will be painful. We need to look at economic models to support farmers. Deputy Carthy spoke about entire parishes possibly being affected by not being allowed to farm peatlands anymore. However, they then need to be rewarded for managing carbon. The price of carbon is increasing and will not reduce in the foreseeable future. We need to look at the economic models. The Deputy earlier said that farmers would not be interested unless there is something in the economic sphere for them. We need to consider how we can reward farmers to do the right thing. It is an important point.

Much of the focus is on land being non-productive because a farmer cannot produce beef or milk from it. However, we need to look at the farm as a whole and understand the parts that are contributing to biodiversity, the parts that are contributing to not emitting greenhouse gas emissions or are sequestering greenhouse gas emissions are of value and farmers need to be paid for it.