Mr. Declan Meally:

I thank the Deputy for his questions, which were excellent. I thank him for the opportunity, insofar as I can give him our own thoughts and discussions on some of the work that is ongoing. My colleague, Ms Coyle, can talk about some of the work that is being done. We are very conscious of the Irish Green Building Council report and the work with UCD. We are also funding some other work with them this year. The Deputy will know the phrase "what gets measured gets done". The key thing for us, from an SEAI point of view and nationally, is really how we are going to account for this and what the accounting methodology is in relation to embodied carbon. The task that has been set to us is helping to co-ordinate that over 2022 and to have a methodology at the beginning of 2023 in terms of how the embodied carbon is going to be carried out. We have commissioned some research to follow on from that study with the Irish Green Building Council. Hopefully, we will see the outputs of that coming to the fore towards the end of this year, in terms of starting to see what the methodologies will be. A lot of work has been done and there are a lot of discussions internationally in relation to that. I will refer to Ms Coyle on that.

I will skip to the Deputy's third question on the wish list. I think the Deputy hit the nail on the head in respect of where the biggest opportunity is. We feel that through green public procurement, there are tools there that can be brought in. Again, a good concerted effort is being made across the public sector, under the green public procurement working groups, to look at how we can do some of this work. We have a working group across the public sector where we started that debate. We are sharing knowledge across that group. It it about ensuring that it is not a greenwashing within a procurement exercise. We must ensure that there are actually meaningful clauses within the procurements and the documents to say that this is what we are looking for when we are procuring our new buildings, and that the embodied carbon is a factor that is taken into account and probably scored as part of the procurement rules on it.

Ms Coyle will reply to the Deputy’s question on the targets. It is on the operational side, but she might outline some of the work that is ongoing internationally.