Dr. Frank O'Mara:

I thank Deputy Smith for the questions. On the first question on LULUCF, what that means is that the Government sets sectoral targets and agreed those last July for all the sectors. There was a lot of debate and discussion at the time. The Deputy may recall the one we were most interested in was the agriculture target that was set at 25%. All other sectors, energy, transport and so on, had their sectoral targets set but the LULUCF sector, which is the land use, land use change and change forestry, was not set at that time. I was careful about the wording of the press release at the time which stated that it was deferred for 18 months to allow new scientific knowledge to emerge. That was the wording of the Government statement at the time. The Deputy is right that we know a lot about the practices that will impact on this but as we outlined in our statement, there are huge uncertainties around emissions from land and in particular emissions from drained agricultural peats. First, we are not 100% sure what the area of those in the country is. It is somewhere between 300,000 ha and 400,000 ha. There is ongoing research to get a better idea as to what the exact area is. The second uncertainty is that we are not sure how well-drained those peats are any more. They were drained in the 1960s and 1970s and anecdotal evidence suggests a lot of the drains no longer work so those lands have already become rewetted to some extent or to a great extent. The second uncertainty is around how effective the drains that we assume still work are. The third uncertainty is what the actual emissions from those drained peatlands are. We currently assume in our national inventory, using the default values because we do not have national values yet, they are emitting around 20 tonnes per hectare. That may not be correct and we are currently in the process of putting in place a soil carbon observatory to give us actual measurements on drained peatlands and they may turn out to be higher but they may turn out to be lower.

Those are the three levels of uncertainty as to what the extent of the emissions from drained agricultural peatlands is. That is not to say the Deputy is not 100% right. We know what we can do to reduce the emissions whatever they are, in that there are definitely emissions from them. We know that things like partial or full rewetting will reduce those emissions but we need to try to get greater certainty as to what the parameters are within which we are working and what the extent of emissions is. We are doing a very interesting piece of work to see how much of those emissions, whether it is 20 tonnes or 30 tonnes or 10 tonnes of CO2 per hectare, we can rewet while still being able to maintain a certain level of agricultural activity on those soils by what we call partial rewetting, or bringing the water table up to maybe 20 cm or 30 cm below ground level as opposed to total flooding of those soils. Those are the research questions we are trying to answer.