Ms Edwina Love:

The concept of carbon creation, measuring carbon and trading it is still in its infancy across Europe. The European Commission is moving ahead. It published a communication in December. An expert group is being formed. That group intends to meet at the end of the year. From a departmental perspective, we see tremendous opportunity here. We are issuing a call for evidence in the next couple of weeks so that interested stakeholders will be able to engage with that process. As I said at the outset, the measurement, reporting and verification side of that is critical. We need to be able to say exactly what we have, where we have it and have a baseline from which we can then measure improvement. Mr. Blackwell might wish to speak on that, but I will answer the other question first.

Regarding the engagement with the farming community, the process for announcing the sectoral emissions ceilings is entirely a matter for the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications. From a departmental perspective, it is our intention to revise the Ag Climatise document on foot of the ceiling that is allocated to the sector. Again, it is to go back out and talk to people about the concrete actions they need to take on their farms to contribute. There are no secrets about most of the actions. They are all well known and are in the public domain, but it is to try to communicate them. Obviously, we will be relying heavily on the advisory services both private and in Teagasc for providing that knowledge and knowledge transfer on the ground. That is our intention.