Ms Meabh Gallagher:

In the absence of an integrated assessment and model, three iterations allowed for sharing of assumptions or allowing the models to speak to one another in a limited way to consider aspects such as biodiversity, for example, and dependency on bioenergy. After that third iteration the council was left with over 1,000 permutations and combinations of scenarios. After the assessment of that long list of scenarios for the warming impact, there was a shorter subset in which the council considered aspects such as feasibility, compliance with EU targets and ultimately the higher ambition of the Paris temperature goal. That left the council with 15 scenarios which underpin the proposal. The report contains the detail of the assumptions underpinning those 15 scenarios. Inherent in there is the trade-off on the levels of ambition between agriculture, land use and energy. Targeting the lower level of ambition across all three would not be sufficient to deliver the budget. That provides the optionality for the Government's considerations in the approval of the budget and subsequent assignment of sectoral emissions ceilings in line with that budget.