Dr. Kevin Hanrahan:

On the peer review process, the model itself, generally, is not peer reviewed, but the papers that write up the results that are generated with the model have been peer reviewed. The modelling process was also reviewed as part of the review of the EPA's projections generation infrastructure because the model is used to provide the agricultural activity projections that underpin the agency's projections of emissions from the sector. In addition, it is always under development and it has been used for more than 20 years in different iterations to inform agricultural policy here and at a European Union level. Models with which it is integrated are also used in the US to inform Congress's considerations of economic policy.

In contrast to the TIM, it is not an optimisation model; it is a structural econometric model. It is parameterised econometrically using economic theory, combined with Irish data. All of the data that are used in the model are published by the CSO or EUROSTAT. The projections of agricultural activity levels that we use to create the numbers in terms of greenhouse gases are using the numbers used by the EPA in the creation of the greenhouse gas inventories for agriculture. There is nothing hidden in the data that is used. There are thousands of parameters in these models. Generally, there are cascading effects all through them. We have a different approach to transparency to Dr. Daly. Our results are out there. The data that we use are all publicly available CSO and EUROSTAT data and European Commission, Department Agriculture, Food and the Marine or CSO prices. The parameters are not publicly available. That was a decision that we could make. It would be a challenge for a member of the public or another scientific peer to use or change them in an intelligent way.

On understanding the scenarios, I think what the Deputy asked in her question about the role of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is to misunderstand the Department's role. We were doing work in this space for the Department. We were a State agency reporting to the Department in advance of the formation of the carbon budgets committee. We had begun to run scenarios looking at different paths to potential sectoral targets in advance of this committee being formed. The context was the climate change and biodiversity resolution being passed by the Dáil. There was a commitment in the programme for Government for a significant reduction in emissions by 51%. We started to do analysis for the Department and to run scenarios. That work became a subset of the work that we went on to do during the past year for the carbon budgets committee. It is not that the Department was determining the scenarios. Those scenarios were determined within the carbon budgets committee, but there was an intersection between the work we have been doing for the Department and the work that the committee set for us to do in parallel with the work detailed in the table on the energy-agriculture allocation split in the briefing note .

On how we modelled things in agriculture, in terms of, for example, not inseminating cows, that would be a pretty inefficient way to go about it, because there are all the greenhouse gas emissions from the cows that are still alive, but none of the milk or meat that they create if they are inseminated. We did not do that. What we have done in the model is we have introduced implicit taxes to change the economic incentive that farmers have to breed and put those cows into calf, whether they are dairy or beef cows, or ewes into lamb. Those assumptions about the implicit taxes are what drive the behaviour of the economic agents in our model. Our model is an economic model. It is a pretty standard partial equilibrium model that produces a response to economic signals. If we reduce the incentive to farm these type of activities, they will reduce. We basically reduce the incentive to farm dairy or beef, and in fact, all these type of bovine agricultural activities, progressively to get a larger reduction in agricultural activity levels and a larger reduction in the emissions from agriculture associated with those activity levels. It is not about assuming that farmers will just keep cows, expend money, create greenhouse gases and not have any output. What happens in the model, and what we think would be most likely to happen in reality, is that farmers will cull those cows if the economic incentives are there for them to do so. In a simple sense, that is what drives the behaviour we have seen across the scenarios we have run for the carbon budgets committee.