Mr. Philip Blackwell:

Just to add to that, the monitoring, reporting and verification are very important. To garner industry funding in that regard to actually sell a product, which it would be in terms of carbon sequestration, one needs to be quite certain of what that is in the actual certificate of carbon one is selling. There are many elements to the land and how it is used and to the biological processes which influence what is sequestered in a year. For example, a hectare of grass or a grassland area in mineral soils has approximately 200 tonnes of carbon within it. To measure the change within that, it is approximately half a tonne per year in terms of the sequestration or even lower than that depending on how wet it is, the climate and so forth. That is an approximately 0.25% change from year to year.

The research that is needed to get to that point of having a carbon balance for the entire farm is something we need to strive for and something we need. There is a body of work that we have started to invest in, and that needs to be done. That is going back to the LiDAR we mentioned earlier, the national land cover map, the soils, the research projects we have started this year, such as RePEAT, improving our soils maps and then going back to our national agricultural soil carbon observatory, which there is investment in and which will have probably the largest amount of flux towers in Europe. There is work starting there and it is hoped we will get a flood of data coming through which will all feed into this process, but it is just slow in terms of the biological processes around land use and sequestration.

On the hedgerows, the sequestration is measured in the EPA inventory in terms of mineral grassland and also in terms of our organic soils that are farmed, which have higher emissions. On balance, our grasslands are in an emission overall on a national basis. We need to get down to the granular level on a farm-by-farm basis where we would know whether it is in a positive, but there will be difficulties where farms with organic soils may have issues with that.