Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Ms Donnelly. Turning to carbon budgets, I am one of those who have a concern about the timing of the two budgets. I am a strong believer of the bird in the hand. In an area such as climate change, where there is that cumulative impact and we hit tipping points, there is no negotiation backwards. Given we cannot control what is happening elsewhere, we should front-load what we can. In the context of the comparatively quite low reductions in emissions in the short term leading to higher reductions later, I wonder about that for some areas. One sector that was mentioned was that of agriculture. Ireland has signed up to commit to a 30% reduction in methane emissions within an earlier period. The council’s technical paper acknowledges the fact methane has an earlier and harder impact on warming, even though the long-term impact is very much front-loaded into this period in which, as Ms Donnelly described, many parts of the system will still only be moving towards emission reduction. The front-loaded emissions, therefore, count more. Does she expect there to be some revision to the climate action plan and the climate budgets to reflect that ambition on methane to which Ireland has signed up?

Ms Donnelly mentioned the issue of investment in the context of front-loading. Two issues strike me in the context of our seeking to be prudent, one of which relates to the sectoral ranges in the climate action plan. It will be only if all the upper reaches of the sectoral targets are reached that we will hit 51%, and that strikes me as very risky. Even within the past month, two sectors have started pleading special cases, and many others will too. Perhaps it would have been more prudent to model scenarios the halfway point in each range would get us to, whereby the midpoint would be the scenario that would bring us closer to 51%, which would give space for certain sectors to overperform. At the moment, it seems the 51% is a harder ceiling. There is much space for the floor to fail, whereas the ceiling is hard. Will Ms Donnelly comment on that? Should it be revised to give more scope and flexibility? I ask this bearing in mind our ultimate objective of a 1.5°C increase and the fact that, at the moment, the scenarios being considered globally will bring us only to a 50% probability of 1.5°C. Those are really bad odds. It is a 50:50 chance of staying within what experts say would be slightly less than catastrophic increases.

There is also the issue of forward-counting. We should not start to have inaccuracies, maths tricks or incentives built in to our carbon budgets. If we want to give incentives, there are other ways to do that.

In terms of forward-counting for a forest that we do not know if it will burn down-----