Dr. David Styles:

The forestry issue is extremely challenging. Dr. Hanrahan has already outlined some of the barriers. There is resistance to long-term land use change, with farmers reluctant to commit land to forestry which can never then be changed back to other agricultural uses. It is a big commitment. There are also huge issues around licensing, from what I understand. There are difficulties with the speed of, and level of administration associated with, obtaining a licence, not to mention the work involved in both establishing and cutting a forest. Those are very real barriers. If the economics were stronger, maybe we could overcome some of those barriers but at the moment they are not.

A lot of the work we have done, both in Ireland for the carbon budget committee but also in the UK, shows the future value. If we are very forward-looking and think about where we need to be in 30 years' time, namely, climate neutral, we are going to need a lot of wood for various things, buildings for example. We could be using cross-laminated timber and glulam which are capable of producing buildings that are ten to 15 storeys high but we do not have that processing capacity in Ireland right now. This is where we get to the transformative nature of the challenge, to which Professor Ó Gallachóir alluded. We are not going to get to where we need to be without huge, systemic changes. The insight we have gained from the work we have done tells us that we also need to think about integrating changes across systems. This is also relevant for the energy sector because a large amount of the wood that is harvested from commercial forestry will not go into high-value uses. Approximately 30% to 40% of it will go into products which can be used in construction but the off-cuts, dust residues and so on can go in to energy production. There is a possibility of providing some of that baseload energy in the future from wood via cascading value chains at the end of life.

The way to think about forestry is to think about how it contributes to the future economy, sustainable buildings and sustainable energy. We could be linking some of that wood energy with carbon capture in the future to have a permanent, negative emissions technology. That biogenic carbon does not need to get back to the atmosphere if we lock it up in buildings for 50 years or we burn it and then capture the carbon again. It is an indefinite sink of carbon dioxide in that sense. Those are the kinds of transformations we need if we are ever to achieve climate neutrality in the long term. This is a mix of insight from research we have done and personal opinion on some pathways that we might need to pursue to get to long-term net zero.

A final point on this relates to the carbon credit values. Professor John FitzGerald is not here today but he has looked at some of the value of offsets in the future from forestry. We could be talking about billions of euro per year in the value of offsets once we start valuing carbon dioxide emissions at hundreds of euro per tonne, which is what is projected ten or 20 years into the future. There is very real value there in terms of the value of avoided emissions and offsetting which could be realised. The difficulty is that this is something we anticipate in the future. The question is how we translate that into money in farmers' pockets now to actually change behaviour on the ground. That is where the big, fundamental challenge lies at the moment.