Malcolm Noonan (Green Party)

Cuirim fáilte roimh na finnéithe. I commend the advisory council on the work it did with the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council earlier this year on the report on the costs of missing the targets. It is an excellent report.

I have a couple of questions, one based on some of the public submissions, from Professor John Sweeney and others, as regards their conclusion around the current proposals that they have not been formulated in a way that clearly or transparently meets the requirements of the climate Act. They say it is essential that the Government urgently brings forward substantial new and additional interventions to directly and reliably reduce greenhouse gas emissions much more quickly than has been achieved to date. I would welcome a comment on that. Chair, this will require further sessions, I think, for consideration.

I have a question about the Paris test and the technologies around carbon capture and storage. The report states:

The Integrated Assessment Model scenarios with low or no CCS deployment require considerable increases in energy efficiency and near-term rapid fall in energy demand to meet commitments under the Paris Agreement.

Is the council factoring that little or no deployment of CCS into the modelling and, if so, are our initial targets set out in the Act now much more onerous and urgent?

I have a second question about the biodiversity chapter, where reference is made to tradeoffs at catchment scale and the positive and negative impacts on biodiversity. We are aware of these as we move to deploy ORE, but on land as well there are significant challenges when there are proposals for additional forestry. We see the impacts the two big storms have had on forestry, with 26,000 ha lost. Professor Yvonne Buckley has spoken about trees being planted today that may not be in the right place in 20 years' time. As regards the tradeoffs around nature restoration and looking at the nature restoration plan and restoring habitats to a reference period rather than optimising land use for forestry, does the council have a view on those tradeoffs as to what is better in terms of carbon reduction and sequestering carbon from restoring peatlands versus planting forestry?