Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am never one to miss an opportunity to bore people about it. I am really enjoying this discussion. I am reminded of the Alain de Botton book, Religion for Atheists. This is like nature for economists or nature for accountants. It is trying to put a number on that spreadsheet so that things that are often discounted as externalities are counted in there. It is one of the reasons I enjoy talking with people who are approaching ecology from a religious point of view because they understand intrinsic worth.

What the witnesses are trying to do is to interpret intrinsic worth and put it on the balance sheet so that people can understand it. Our current metrics, such as GDP, just represent the gaping maw of capitalism, which does not care what it eats but only cares about throughput. When we measure our economic performance based on throughput alone, we completely lose sight of stocks versus flows. GDP only measures flows.

I have a good few questions. I will put them individually to Dr. O'Mahony and Dr. O'Hagan-Luff. Dr. O'Mahony has done a lot of work on future forecasting. I recently read Towards a Fair and Sustainable Europe 2050, a report from the EU Policy Lab. Unlike most of these documents, which are terribly dry and difficult to read, this report forecast four different scenarios in terms of climate and net carbon neutrality. It forecast four different scenarios and then backcast from there to determine the policy objectives that should be pursued to achieve those goals. I was very struck by something in Dr. O'Mahony's opening statement. He asked what it would look like if rural people, rural livelihoods and nature were at the centre of what we did, as opposed to the status quo. One of my issues is that we do not do that vision piece, even in the land use review or land use policy. I still do not have a sense of what the landscape will look like in 2050, something that would enable me to work backwards. Will Dr. O'Mahony comment on that? The Future Generations Commissioner for Wales is an example of how to do that foresight piece, allowing for backcasting into present-day policy. Will Dr. O'Mahony explore that a little bit?

The time horizon for decision-making in politics is the next election. If you are running a large corporate business, it is the next reporting quarter. Those people in east Cork and west Waterford who were flooded out of it want to see something now. There is a political imperative to act quickly, which can be entirely necessary, but things like nature-based solutions are relatively invisible when compared to a concrete wall and, in many cases, take a long time to develop. Will Dr. O'Mahony explore that piece a little bit?

I will ask Dr. O'Hagan-Luff about the green bonds. The Government has now formulated a €3.15 billion climate and nature fund. That is a fantastic initiative that will bear significant fruit in the future. In Ireland, some €150 billion is on deposit. Hong Kong has been relatively successful with regard to green bonds. The UK has been less successful because it got the interest rate wrong. When I look at that €150 billion, I see a resource that could be put to work. Right now, it is sitting in a bank and losing money in real time because the interest rates are so low. I wanted to give Dr. O'Hagan-Luff an opportunity to talk a little bit more about how we could leverage that money. It is not just about the monetary value, but about community empowerment. A lot of people who are facing up to this challenge wonder what the hell they can do about it. Investing in these green bonds would mean putting some of their economic resources to work. I wanted to give Dr. O'Hagan-Luff an opportunity to expand on that idea because she touched on it fairly briefly in her opening statement.