Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

To turn to Dr. O'Hagan-Luff and Dr. Ní Dhuill, I agree with much of what they said. I am sceptical, however, about the main drive towards which they are pushing. Last week, the committee heard about the rights of nature approach. Obviously, they are coming at it very much from the natural capital approach. There are fundamental problems with that which I wish to explore and on which I wish to get their response. On an overarching level, it is effectively doing the same kind of thing that got us into this situation, which is treating nature as something that can be commodified. It is attempting to deal with the problem of externalisation by internalising those costs, but it still is driving commodification of nature.

On a more practical level, there are the problems of commensurability. It is exactly as Dr. Ní Dhuill or Dr. O'Hagan-Luff was saying. Biodiversity, even more than carbon, is not commensurate. One cannot swap a flood plain here for a woodland there. It is very difficult to do that and linked to that is the problem of valuing these things. People can explore and try to put a monetary value on them but it is difficult to know whether that value is accurate. We just do not understand how interconnected nature is and how doing something somewhere has a knock-on impact.

On a most practical level, I put it to the witnesses that this is the dominant approach to dealing with climate change and it is failing. There are many studies about carbon offsets which show that most of them are a scam. A recent study in SCIENCEfound that only 6% of billions of euro of forest carbon offsets were definitely reducing carbon. A good portion was definitely just nonsense and another portion was dubious. It is not working for climate. Maybe it is working but the evidence suggests it is not. Why would we go for the same sort of approach to biodiversity?