Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 28 March 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

Nature Restoration Law and Land Use Review: Discussion

Ms Sadhbh O'Neill:

I thank the Chairman for the invitation to attend today's session of the committee to consider the recent report as part of the national land use review and the proposals for rewetting of agricultural soils under the draft EU nature restoration law. I am the climate campaign co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth and the co-ordinator of the Stop Climate Chaos coalition. The latter is a coalition to enable environment, development and faith-based youth and social justice organisations to work together to ensure Ireland does its fair share to tackle the causes and consequences of climate change.

The most recent summary from the IPCC of its sixth assessment report highlighted yet again that greenhouse gas emissions have an unequivocal impact on global temperature and are driven by unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use changes. The IPCC's Summary for Policymakers highlighted that in most global modelled pathways, land-use change, forestry, via reforestation and reduced deforestation, and the energy supply sector reach net zero CO2emissions earlier than do the building, industry and transport sectors. In other words, if we are to have any chance of remaining below an increase of 1.5°C or even 2°C, a transformation in how land is managed for food, fibre and timber production, as well as for nature, will be required. The science is clear that agriculture, forestry and other land-use options provide many adaptation and mitigation benefits that can be upscaled in the near term if the political will is there to implement these changes rapidly.

We welcome the publication of the land use synthesis report by Haughey et al.in recent weeks, which injects a much-needed sense of urgency into national climate policy discussions. The agriculture, forestry and other land use, AFOLU, sector as a whole is a significant net emitter, while also being the only significant source of potential sinks and carbon removals. The report makes clear that major changes in our approach to managing land will be required to achieve climate neutrality, or net zero emissions, before 2050. Under all of the scenarios modelled by the researchers, net zero is only achievable with significantly higher annual rates of afforestation, agricultural efficiencies, rewetting of organic soils and degraded peatlands and reduced livestock numbers, in tandem with one another.

If, in addition to achieving climate neutrality, additional land is to be allocated for nature, bioenergy or cropland, the scenarios in the report show that the policy interventions become even more challenging. We do not underestimate the difficulty in getting agreement for these changes. Any one of these strands - increasing forestry, rewetting soils and peatlands and reducing livestock numbers - would be contentious but to get to net zero we will need to do all of them.

Unfortunately, the marketing campaigns of some agrifood businesses, backed in many instances by the Government and State bodies, have given the impression over many years that everything we do on the land is already sustainable. In fact, our land, our waters, our forests and nature are all in deep trouble. Our greenhouse gas emissions have not declined appreciably since 1990 and have risen again in recent years. Biodiversity loss has accelerated and water quality is in serious decline, due in large measure to agricultural pressures. Change will be all the more difficult because an effective environmental and climate policy has been trumped, in the agricultural sector at least, by the lure of export markets. As it was Government policy that led to the expansion of the dairy sector in Ireland since 2011, farmers cannot and must not be blamed for the resulting lock-in effects and the resistance to new approaches.

We note with alarm that misrepresentations of the potential for alternative greenhouse gas metrics as well as overestimates of the sequestration potential of certain agricultural practices are still quite common in public and media discourse. It has become common in some quarters to equate evidence-based climate and biodiversity action with an ideological attack on traditional rural livelihoods. In our opinion, political leadership from the Department of agriculture and leading farming organisations has been absent. Our experience on the ground is that farmers care deeply about nature conservation and climate action but national policies and CAP rules have been incentivising expansion and intensification. We believe that a new national stakeholder dialogue, aimed at achieving climate neutrality in the land-use sectors and which is inclusive and participatory, would go a long way to reframing the debate about land use in a frank, constructive and evidence-based manner

The recently amended climate Act establishes a process for the adoption of five-year carbon budgets and emissions ceilings to be adopted by the Government which set the “maximum amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are permitted in different sectors of the economy”. Despite having one of the most ambitious and prescriptive climate laws in Europe, the Government has still left blank pages in the emissions ceilings, with no target set for LULUCF and unallocated savings of 5.25 million tonnes of CO2equivalent in annual savings between 2026 and 2030. This effectively means the Government is flying blind in respect to pathways to achieving climate neutrality by 2050 for the AFOLU sectors overall. We urge the committee to write to the relevant Ministers to demand that the LULUCF target be agreed as soon as possible to give clarity and certainty to all relevant stakeholders and that the target be set with a view to stabilising and reversing carbon losses from organic soils, hedgerow removal and degraded wetlands as rapidly as possible.

Ireland has agreed to achieve economy-wide climate neutrality by 2050 at the latest. However, this goal applies to the whole economy, not the AFOLU sector specifically. Given the potential of agricultural land management, forestry and peatlands to sequester carbon, the sector could achieve net negative emissions well before 2050, thus supporting the more technically challenging target of net zero for other sectors. Unfortunately, we are not on track. We still do not have a long-term climate strategy so it is imperative the Department of climate action finalise such a strategy as quickly as possible to give policy certainty and a clear trajectory of policy interventions that are aligned with achieving climate neutrality for the AFOLU sector well before 2050.

I will add a couple of points about carbon removals and storage in land and soils and carbon farming. Sequestration, by definition, must be additional to what would happen without intervention. The land use review report shows that there is still a great deal of uncertainty and variation in soil organic carbon data across the country. Relatively common changes in land use from grassland to cropland and back again make data collection difficult and often unreliable.

It is not enough to measure the soil organic carbon and claim "credits" in respect of what is already there. Maintaining or increasing "stocks" of fixed stores of carbon, rather than "flows", is what counts as mitigation, which must be "additional" under the IPCC and the Kyoto Protocol accounting rules. Removals, however, must also be permanent, which is very difficult to ensure in the context of agricultural soils. It is easier to do this with forestry, but there are some difficulties there as well. Furthermore, there is insufficient evidence on the condition and extent of hedgerows at present to ascertain their current or potential role in removals overall. The BRIAR report by the EPA, which has a number of reports looking into hedgerow carbon stocks, estimated a net removal rate of between 0.16% and 0.3% per annum, suggesting that hundreds of kilometres of hedgerow have been removed each year, often without the required permissions.

The European Commission has recently published proposals on certifying carbon removals but this proposal, in our view, has numerous shortcomings. To be considered a true carbon removal, a verifiable process must be proven to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and store it permanently for at least two centuries. In contrast, carbon farming is an extremely broad and volatile concept covering different types of nature-based activities that can be very beneficial to nature, but with very different estimated durations of carbon storage grouped together. That said, all these approaches lead to carbon being stored temporarily in carbon sinks that are vulnerable to human and natural disturbances. We urge policymakers to think beyond market-based solutions and instead focus on a viable alternative, which is activity-based finance. The EU, its member states and the private sector can financially support farmers and foresters to adopt and maintain good practices for the environment and the climate without relying on removals that are in fact only temporary and without relying exclusively on a market signal.

I will conclude with a number of recommendations. The publication of this synthesis report published by the EPA is just the beginning of what should be a national evidence-based conversation about how land use can achieve climate neutrality. We suggest further sessions of this committee on further chapters of the land use review, LUR, with the relevant experts and authors. That would be helpful in drawing out key learnings from the report and the underlying science and in teasing out the relevant policy options and trade-offs. The underlying science and practice of rewetting and restoration of degraded peatlands is relatively new and evolving. The committee should consider investigating those practices that involve raising the water table while maintaining agricultural activity to defuse fear and get the facts straight about what is possible, feasible and beneficial in catchment-specific contexts. The committee could investigate and explore the synergies with the nature restoration law to get a picture of the ecological benefits of rewetting. Above all, the committee could seek assurances from the three lead Departments, namely the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, that they are jointly committed to achieving the goal of climate neutrality, that they support the nature restoration law and its proposed targets and that they will work together to deliver the commitments in the programme for Government and the climate action plan. Above all, we urgently need to get on with the job of restoring degraded peatlands, rewetting organic agricultural soils and preventing the further loss of hedgerows, which are the fastest and most reliable ways to prevent emissions and carbon losses.

I thank the committee for the invitation to speak.

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