Professor Hannah Daly:

When it comes to our climate obligations, there are EU targets, which are framed as net zero by 2050, and that is all greenhouse gases. Ireland is party to that. Advice given to the council by Dr. Oliver Geden showed that if Ireland was to adopt temperature neutrality and not get to net zero, meaning we had ongoing emission of methane and other gases from the agriculture sector, other EU countries would have to do more to compensate for our emissions and that would be unlikely to be acceptable at the EU level. I mentioned the majority of our emissions under the effort-sharing regulation are in agriculture and we are projected to miss that 2030 target by a very substantial amount. It is far more on a per capita basis than other European countries and, as a result, we face significant compliance fines. If we are to meet the 1.5°C goal, we will have to go into long-term carbon drawdown. After whatever point that is when we reach net zero CO2 emissions, whether it is 2040 or 2050, we will have to actively draw CO2 back down from the atmosphere to make up for the lack of action in these decades. That should be accounted for in our long-term vision as well. Net zero is not enough.

The Senator asked about other scenarios and that is a critical question. What scenarios underpin the carbon budgets that were proposed by the council? I was part of the carbon budgets working group, as were many other academics and academic groups, and produced modelling studies to support the council as well as energy systems scenarios. There were two other modelling groups. Teagasc modelled agricultural decarbonisation pathways and the University of Galway modelled both agricultural scenarios and land use scenarios. The council ultimately chose two scenarios from Teagasc and a number of land use scenarios from the University of Galway study led by Dr. David Styles, but it did not choose the most ambitious of either the agriculture or land use scenarios within that set of groups and did not say why, in the ultimate decision it made and the reports it gave, it did not include more ambitious decarbonisation scenarios from the agriculture sector which show more fundamental structural change and diversification in our land use and more ambitious afforestation targets like 25,000 ha per year.