Mr. John Hourigan:

I thank the committee for inviting us here today. I am a farmer from rural County Limerick and I am founder member and chairman of the Carbon Removals Action Group, CRAG, which was set up in 2019 to help farmers realise the value from their carbon removals, mainly in forestry. This matter is not yet settled by any means.

However, today is focused on methane and while there are several concerns we hope to discuss, and there are goals shared by everyone in this room, we all know that climate change is real and happening as we speak and steps must be taken to reduce everybody's contribution.

The specifics of what should be included, the criteria for legally binding targets, international commitments that have been made, how it should be included and calculated, which sectoral group they should sit in and how all these decisions are reached and communicated to the farming community and the wider public are points of serious concern.

I take this opportunity to introduce my colleagues who are here with me today. Professor Myles Allen needs no introduction. He is a world-renowned climate scientist and is currently professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and director of the Oxford Net Zero initiative. He was the co-ordinating lead author on the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, special report on the 1.5 C^o reduction and has been involved with the IPCC's third, fourth and fifth assessments. Ms Nadaline Webster is a co-founder of CRAG and a strategic and creative consultant in the legal technology sector working primarily with early-stage start-ups through to equity events. She lives with her partner, who is an organic farmer in County Limerick.

There are six core points to the discussion on the calculation of methane that urgently need consideration and discussion, which I will address them briefly. The relevant sources are listed in the references at the end of this document. One of my main concerns has been the ongoing reputational crisis in Irish agriculture, which is due in no small part to repeated assertions that methane emissions from cattle are largely responsible for global warming. It can be argued that once calculated correctly, methane emissions from cattle are not contributing to increased global temperatures. To quote Professor Allen on the same matter: "Achieving climate neutrality in terms of metric-equivalent emissions could mean eliminating practices, such as ruminant agriculture, that are not actually causing global warming."

The basis for the separate treatment of methane, outside of the carbon cycle of which it is naturally a part, is provided in the 2006 IPCC guidelines. It states:

CO₂emissions from livestock are not estimated because annual net CO₂emissions are assumed to be zero - the CO₂photosynthesised by plants is returned to the atmosphere as respired CO₂. A portion of the C is returned as CH4 and for this reason CH4 requires separate consideration.

It should have stated that the CH4 converts back into CO₂, which completes the cycle. This is all absolutely correct but must be applied correctly, which is not the case in Ireland currently. "Separate consideration" should not be taken to mean removing it from the carbon cycle and treating it as a CO₂equivalent.

CO₂emissions from livestock are net zero in absolute terms because of the carbon cycle. Almost all of the CO₂taken in by the animal through the forage it consumes is returned very quickly through respiration from the animal and through the meat and milk consumed by humans. Approximately 50% is respired immediately through respiration. In Ireland, a small amount, which could be 5%, is locked into the soil. Approximately 3% is returned through methane. All the rest goes into the meat and milk. Because of this cycle, all the billions of tonnes of methane produced over millions of years by billions of ruminants has been recycled. It is all gone because there is a system to take care of it.

They are also right in saying that methane requires separate consideration. All scientists who have published on this issue since 2015 agree that biogenic methane requires separate consideration. The problem is that the Government insists on treating biogenic methane as CO₂equivalent, viewing it in the same way as methane from mining, which is a one-way ticket. This gives rise to a situation where 65% of agriculture's carbon footprint is supposedly made up of biogenic methane, which is not causing any further global warming as long as livestock emissions decline by 3% per decade. Professor Allen will elaborate on this. The Paris Agreement set a temperature goal, not a CO₂equivalent goal. A core part of that is a stable national herd. Contrary to a lot of people's understanding, over the past 40 years, the Irish herd has been largely stable. It has fluctuated but all through the 1990s, total cattle numbers were in or around 7 million peaking in 1998 at 7.67 million and it now stands at 6.9 million. This is a drop of 10% from peak of 25 years ago. It is worth noting that in the same timeframe, the number of vehicles on our roads increased by 64% and air travel increased by 350%.

The other sector that is very important involves the ledgers relating to these different things. Land use, land use change and forestry, LULUCF, contains all the removals from forestry and grassland, which are huge. In the agriculture sector, the emissions are put in. We are being hard done by in how emissions generated through anaerobic digestion are categorised.

I will finish with a plea to Ireland to count the methane as separate, to have a separate target for biogenic methane and to listen to the likes of Professor Allen and Dr. Mitloehner, who make the very valid points that we can get to neutral in terms of the impact of global warming by taking on board a correct method of measurement.