Dr. Deirdre Lynn:

I will tackle the question of whether all EU countries should have 30% targets. We really need to look at the landscape of a lot of the EU countries. Some of them are quite extensively forested with natural forests, and a lot of those are state-owned natural forests, so a lot of those countries may have quite a higher proportion of their areas protected. Ireland's landscape is quite complex in respect of the average landholding size, particularly in the west, where probably most of our more pristine biodiversity areas are, so it is slightly more complicated. If you look at how long it took us to get through the process of the 14% we have protected, I think we have learned a lot of lessons from that process. We really need to sit down and think about where we should target to increase some of that terrestrial area. We certainly should make sure we have captured any of our remaining old oak forests in that as well as, perhaps, some more of our wetlands and fens. Both those would be more carbon-rich systems.

There is probably a reason for the different percentages in different countries. Also, Ireland is 90% marine, which is very important to remember. I think and hope that that is where our contribution will be, proportionately higher than a lot of the other EU countries are in the marine sphere. We need to look at our State-owned and public lands. We are looking at our landbanks for housing; we should look at our landbanks for biodiversity purposes as well. Then we should look very closely at any of the areas where we have been putting EU money in for restoration purposes as well.

As for the lack of data and data collection, we have over the years been building up our monitoring data sets. It is quite costly to go out and get ecologists in the field, particularly in remote and upland areas and to get really good habitat maps of a lot of our upland or coastal complexes. However, we have been building them over time, and there is the new land cover map that has been produced by Ordnance Survey Ireland in conjunction with the EPA. That will be released soon and will give us a much better resolution of the type of land cover across Ireland. We dealt with a much cruder map in previous times, so we should have a lot more information.

We also now need to look towards more interpretation of satellite imagery. I remember trying that back in around 2006, it must have been. We commissioned some satellite imagery from, I think, somewhere in Mayo. I remember at the time recognising that there would be cloud cover - it is Ireland and some imaging will be lost to cloud cover - but I did not realise there was cloud shadow as well. We lost a lot to the shadow of the cloud.

All these technologies are improving over time and different types of remote sensing can also be used to get over this. We are continually developing in that area. Some very good EPA-funded projects have been developing habitat mapping using remote imagery. We hope our data sets will build over time. In agriculture, people are looking to get biodiversity inventories of many farms.

We need to build a lot of this information together. The biodiversity data centre has obviously been collecting a large amount of species information for us over time and that is building. We are undertaking many measures so we need to look at where these conservation measures are being undertaken, whether they are effective and what change has occurred. We have applied for funding to European mechanisms called strategic integrated projects and strategic nature projects under the EU LIFE instrument. This funding would enable us to collate much of this information and build the architecture to give us all better access and better up-to-date data and information. That is building and we have much to do in that area.

On wealth, as I said, I always think we should be measuring progress by our common good. Various indices are worked on, for example, the happiness index. There should be a different one rather than having only straightforward GDP because it is not a good measure of how the general population are feeling. We need to address that.

On the biodiversity officers, we recognised the need for biodiversity officers to be in all local authorities and that programme is being rolled out over the next couple of years. The Heritage Council is spearheading that development. I hope that once we get a large number of them in place and they are working effectively with the heritage officers, it will have a snowball effect and we can get more funding, possibly through the local area groups under LEADER and under Agenda 21, which perhaps has been renamed. We also have funding for that level, from which teams can be built up. That is what we did in the NPWS. There could be one scientist who was the expert in an area and that person would have to go out and survey that area throughout the whole country. In such cases, the work would be commissioned and the person would use the expertise of consultants but would still go out and do the work. I hope that when teams build up, they will be in a position to engage in a lot of action on the ground and bring on board more expertise.