Professor Barry McMullin:

I hope I can respond to all the Deputy's questions. If I omit something, he should remind me.

On the general area of removals of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it is a difficult question. We in DCU, together with colleagues in Trinity College Dublin, completed an EPA project on this question in Ireland a couple of years ago. I can refer the Deputy to the report on that. One must distinguish different forms of storage of that carbon very carefully. Getting it out of the atmosphere is the first thing. The second thing is to get it into permanent geological storage. Carbon storage in soils, hedgerows and forestry is very different from carbon stored in coal, oil or gas, which is secure for geological time periods. The Deputy has seen with the recent wildfires, for example, how vulnerable carbon stores in biomass are to rerelease into the atmosphere. It is a complex area and I would be happy, maybe at another time, to go into that in more detail. However, there are absolutely limits on how much of that we can do in Ireland.

Food security is a desperately important question, with a growing global population and with many people globally already insecure in the context of food. That insecurity has been severely exacerbated by the conflict in Ukraine. It is extremely important that we collectively pay attention to that. The interaction with the discussion we are having today is that not all food is equal in terms of the nutrition relative to the emissions. Different food types are radically different in the ratio of emissions or more general environmental impacts compared to their nutritional value. There is a great deal of research, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report summarises this very well, indicating not an absolute abolition of livestock-based food but that a global shift in the balance between food types more towards plant-based foods as a proportion of the global diet is probably an essential element of effective mitigation of climate change because those plant-based foods can be substantially lower in greenhouse gas emissions than livestock-based food. How that plays out in different countries is a complex issue. What Ireland's response to that should be needs much more detailed consideration. That absolutely is a complex issue.

As regards the carbon leakage argument, again it is very important. However, it does not just apply to methane or to agricultural emissions, it applies to emissions from all sources. In my written submission, I mentioned that the Paris Agreement is certainly unsatisfactory in many respects. It is not nearly as effective in terms of achieving global co-operation as we collectively want and need it to be, but currently it is the best we have. The architecture of the Paris Agreement completely relies on good-faith, bottom-up action by the parties to that agreement. It is in our interests as a small country because our absolute impact on the climate is very minor. We are reliant on much bigger countries participating fully in the Paris Agreement and discharging their obligations.

This is where leakage enters into it. How do we influence that? We influence it through diplomatic action by engaging with the other parties through the UNFCCC process and by engaging with other countries in Europe. However, if we go to those other countries and try to engage them and try to get them to engage in stronger action, naturally the first question they will ask is, "What are you doing?".

They will compare our per capitacontributions with the per capitacontributions in their own countries. That will be the framework they use to do that. If we want to have any hope – this is completely on a self-interested basis because we do not have to add any collective solidarity to it - it depends on our ability to influence other, bigger countries. That depends on the action we take locally and bringing ourselves down to significantly below the global average per capitain terms of emissions. Only then can we start talking about the leakage argument and make the argument to countries that they are taking advantage of our good behaviour by increasing their emissions. At the moment, however, when we are above average, we are basically operating the leakage in reverse. We are the ones who are free riding on and hoping for greater ambition from other countries. That will not play well in international negotiations.