Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

That did not help us on our land use side. We have started to separate out how we treat land-use emissions, like a lot of European and other countries, recognising that there is a completely different characteristic. My understanding is that land-use emissions last year went from approximately 3.9 million tonnes source of emissions to between 5 million and 6 million tonnes. I apologise, I will get that figure. In other words, there was significant deterioration in our emissions from the land-use sector.

That is primarily because the science keeps changing with regard to the reality when it comes to the counting of emissions, particularly from forestry and the planting of forests on peat soil. The assessment of those shows emissions of 5.614 Mt of carbon dioxide equivalent, an increase of 40%. This significant increase is due to the change to the scientific understanding of what is happening in our forests, as well as the fact that a lot of the forests from the 1980s and 1990s in our forestry system are being felled. That is also worsening our land use emission figures.

Another example to show how these things keep changing is that, on the positive side, there also has been a reassessment of Teagasc's research, which was originally uncertain. While the EPA seemed a bit cautious about it initially, it has now confirmed that the level of carbon storage in our wetland soils was higher than expected because the level of drained soils was lower than had been previously assessed.

The whole area of land use emissions is really complex. It is best to treat it in a slightly different way by following the European distance to trajectory rules rather the sectorial approach that applies to other sectors. It will get harder before it gets better, particularly because of the changing of our forestry system and the clearfelling of large areas of forest that were planted 30 or 40 years ago.