Mr. Niall ? Brolch?in:

I will respond to the Chair's point on the Arterial Drainage Act because there is recent research on a global basis. As I said earlier, Indonesia had a problem with fires in 2015 and as a result took drastic measures which point the way for countries in Europe, including Ireland. As I said earlier, Professor Hans Joosten, who is probably the best known peatlands scientist on the planet, does extensive work there. He is a Dutch scientist based in Germany. He pointed out that Indonesia has, by legal prescription, raised the water level - I am reading this - on almost 4 million ha and installed more than 10,000 observation wells that are fortnightly reported on. Some 1,200 digital loggers carry out daily observation. It is all centralised in an impressive geographic information system, GIS, based monitoring system that warns the landowners as soon as water levels drop below 40 cm below surface. Indonesia has installed 900 weather stations and linked the weather forecast system to inform landowners of rainfall and so on. These measures have gone so far as to, according to its estimate, save 272 million tonnes of CO₂equivalent per year which dwarfs our efforts. Indonesia is a bigger country than Ireland but nevertheless the key point is the linear relationship between average annual water level and GHG emissions. In many cases we are draining land more than is necessary and we are back to 1945.

I note the Chairand Deputy Bruton had a good set of ripostes on this in a previous committee meeting and I was impressed with what they both said. The key point is that in wetting there is a quick gain to be made in simply raising the water level to the maximum level possible that is consistent with the current land use. Research backs this up. We are draining unnecessarily. If we could bring in measures to get rid of unnecessary drainage, it would have a significant impact on emissions.

Many of the cutover peatland sites are not included in the inventory at present. We will not therefore reduce emissions as much as we would like. We need to bring those into the inventory. It is not acceptable. We are talking about a lot of tonnage that is currently not included in the inventory. We need to bring it in because we will not see much gain unless we account for it in the first place.