Dr. Kevin Hanrahan:

I thank committee members for the opportunity to talk to them. I am the head of the rural economy development programme at Teagasc and an economist working in this area. Like Dr. Daly, I do not think it is within our remit to make that judgment about where the fairness of the sectoral balance lies.

The work we did as part of the carbon budgets committee in 2021 looked at many different pathways, as Dr. Daly mentioned, for the energy system. We did the same or equivalent for the agricultural sector, looking at different reduction end points and pathways to those end points for agriculture, and examined what the set of actions identified in the Teagasc marginal abatement cost curve analysis would allow the sector to achieve in the context of reduction efforts. It was clear from that analysis that the lower end of the range chosen by the political system for agriculture could be feasible without large changes in activity levels.

However, at the upper end of that range or beyond, at about 30%, given the set of technologies we have to hand and those that are likely to come on stream over that period, we will need to see changes in activity levels. The analysis we carried out as part of our work for the committee, outlined in the technical note of the carbon budgets committee, sets out some of the economic consequences for the agricultural sector and the food-processing sector and for employment in those sectors and the wider economy of different scenarios we considered, from a 20% reduction target all the way to a 51% pro rataallocation for the agricultural sector.

My colleague Dr. Styles from UL will talk about the forestry contribution. We did some work on the land use, again based on work that is going on at Teagasc. Of course, there are opportunities for the rewetting of carbon-rich soils in particular, which could deliver significant mitigation, but there is nothing of the order of 51%. An awful lot more activity-level change would be required to meet that reduction target by 2030.