Dr. Karl Richards:

Again, I will sound a bit like a broken record – apologies. On the blockages, at the moment we cannot go to farmer Mary or farmer Joe and tell them know they have X amount of peatland on their farm, it is currently drained to this level and therefore the emissions are 1 tonne, 10 tonnes or 20 tonnes. We cannot do that because of all of those uncertainties I mentioned. One of the biggest blockages is knowing what the emissions are from the different land areas across the country on a particular farm. However, we are working hard to try to come up with that. It goes back to that uncertainty, but it really is a blockage. We know areas that have been drained in the past and there are maps of that, some more complete than others. The big question is what the current drainage status is. Many of the drains that were put in in the 1960s and 1970s are not like standard land drainage or more efficient land drainage that has been installed a lot since then on more organo-mineral soils where there is herringbone and interconnecting drains within a field. Basically, these fields had a trench dug around them to drain them. The question then is how far into the peat has that water table been reduced. Currently, we do not have the data on that, but we are trying to get it.

As Mr. Ó Brolcháin said, the lower the water table, the more emissions there are. Again, we have done research on that and taken samples of peat and varied the water table. There is a PhD student about to publish work on that. We know how important that water level is. At the moment, on these agricultural fields, we can see them using remote sensing, but we do not know what the water level is in them. We need to get an idea of that so the farmer can be told it is emitting 1 tonne, 10 tonnes or 20 tonnes. That needs to be known because one does not know how much carbon one will sell or get credit for. Some of that uncertainty could be included in the price a farmer is paid for the carbon. If the emissions are uncertain, then probably a much reduced price would be offered. As the certainty improves, that price could be increased over time. However, I am not an economist. I am no Deputy Bruton, who has probably considered stuff such as this way in the distant past as part of his master’s degree.