Mr. Pat Barry:

I will not return to the barriers but even if we take the introduction of new innovative materials, one has all the costs of certification. We will have to support people who develop new products and the costs of certification and agrément certification are quite considerable. We will have to help them with those. Enterprise Ireland has been doing very good work in helping indigenous companies develop environmental product declarations. Once we have an environmental product declaration, we have the numbers for that product. Then we can say one has an environmental production declaration for this product and it has a global warming potential of so many kilos, and someone else has the same product and it has a much lower value.

The SEAI has what is called the accelerated capital allowance scheme for the most energy-efficient products. We could do something around an accelerated allowance for the most carbon-efficient products. That works at the product level, but if we are looking at systems then we must measure, for example, CLT in the overall building and not just as a product. That is where we have to do the measurement and that is where we are looking at the potential within public procurement to introduce a shadow price for the carbon onto the cost of the building. When one gets a tender, one also applies a shadow price to the tender, and it is the total cost of the shadow price plus the economic price.

We could also look at measures like VAT on products. We could consider reducing VAT from 13.5% to 9% on lower carbon products, if it is performing at 50% below a similar product in a category. There are a number of ways we can approach it, but there is no silver bullet, because it will be a combination of removing barriers and giving slight incentives to improve.

The U taxonomy will help there as well because that will require initially measurement of embodied carbon in buildings. If a company wants to call its building green or if a bank wants to issue a green bond and to give a green loan, then it has to have done the embodied carbon measurement and the next step will be to introduce carbon limits. If one is below a certain limit level, then one will get a green loan. There is a whole combination of incentives like that which could be combined.