Dr. Matthew Crowe:

I will deal with them first. Deputy Mulherin asked about the role of local authorities in dealing with climate change. They have a major role to play. New regional climate offices are being established in Dublin, Mayo, Cork and Kildare. This was announced before Christmas, in tandem with the publication of the national adaptation framework. Not surprisingly, these climate offices will probably focus more on adaptation than mitigation. The local authorities know a lot about adaptation, flood management and dealing with the risks that climate change is bringing upon us. They will have a very big role, and I imagine that as the climate dialogue evolves local government will get more and more involved. It is interesting to see the word "climate" beginning to appear more in the administrative language of local government, even in terms of some of the directors of service now having climate as part of their brief. This would not have been the case ten years ago.

Deputy Pringle asked two specific questions, one on the accounting. As was advised earlier, the agricultural figures are mainly for methane and nitrous oxide, which are from the animals and the fertiliser. The processing plants are accounted for elsewhere in the statistics. A broader climate point on this is that bar the agriculture bit that deals with methane and nitrous oxide everything else is carbon dioxide. This is the driving force in terms of climate change from all of the other sectors, whereas with agriculture it is different as it is predominantly methane from the animals and nitrous oxide mostly from fertiliser use.

The Deputy also asked about Origin Green. I take a slightly different perspective on it than has been said. There is no doubt it is a marketing tool. Many companies and farmers are involved in it and it includes farm sustainability audits and sustainability plans for food businesses. Anything like this is a good thing because it helps to drive behaviour change, particularly with small companies involved in the food sector. I live in Wexford, and I can see it with some of the local butchers who are branding themselves as being green. They are doing things and they want to make a difference. They are not just doing it for marketing purposes. Little things like this can really help in terms of encouraging businesses to think a little differently about their behaviour and move it along in the right direction.

Many members asked about the global issue. On page 11 of the submission there is some text on the international context. It includes a reference to the two special reports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, decided it would have done after the big meeting in Paris. One of these is on climate change and land. The point is that it is a global issue. It does not just affect Ireland. The IPCC acknowledged at that time that more research and work had to be done to look at the whole question of global food production from a climate perspective. This work is happening at present, and the report will be completed in late 2019. This will be a very important report in terms of informing what happens next in how the world deals with the food issue. No doubt it will have some ramifications for Ireland also.

Deputy McConalogue asked about Food Wise 2025 and learnings from other countries. Again, I take a slightly different perspective on Food Wise. The Deputy specifically asked whether it should continue and I would say that the answer is that it should, but there are serious environmental constraints in relation to it. Food Wise acknowledges the fact that food production and expansion in Ireland cannot happen at the expense of the environment.

What is important now is how it happens and how the environmental issues are factored in. Food Wise 2025 is about much more than the beef and dairy industry. It covers areas as diverse as brewing and aquaculture. Pretty much all of the food-producing businesses in the country are in some way connected to Food Wise 2025 but the bit that gets the most attention is the part concerning animal numbers. When Food Harvest 2020 was developed, and subsequently in designing Food Wise 2025, a big part of the plan was that with the end of quotas, dairy would start to expand. At time it was expected that the overall number of animals would not go up. It was anticipated that if the number of dairy cattle went up, the number of beef cattle would go down. However, that is not what has happened. The number of beef cattle is holding up. That is where the environmental constraints issue will become more important.

It does not just concern climate change. It also concerns water in the case of the nitrates directive and the national emissions ceiling directive, which includes a ceiling on the amount of ammonia that the country can produce. Pretty much all of that is produced by agriculture. It is a complicated picture, but overall, as a food producing nation, it is far better for us to have a plan like Food Wise 2025, which acknowledges the environmental constraints, than to go without one. This plan can involve the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and other authorities watching it, reporting on it, assessing, monitoring and carrying out research.

There is a huge amount we can learn from other countries. In particular, I will mention the initiatives I referred to at the very start, which were included in the national development plan. The first of these is the town-scale pilot projects converting food and agricultural waste in agricultural catchments to biogas to supply local networks. I refer here to anaerobic digestion. Other countries have managed to do much more with anaerobic digestion than Ireland. Wexford, to refer to my home county, is now being networked for gas. A question linked to the future-proofing of a town like Wexford is where gas is going to come from in 40 years. It is in an agricultural catchment and there is plenty of agricultural and food waste produced there. That could be used to produce gas of a suitable quality to supply the town network. The farmers would then get a much more stable fertiliser product at the end of the day. It is good to see that thinking of this kind is in the national development plan.

The second initiative which was mentioned was the idea that houses and farms could be their own power plants through the use of renewable technologies like solar power and heat pumps. The technology is getting to the point where it is possible for houses and farms to produce enough electricity for themselves and to sell some excess electricity into the grid. That will require a lot of change. The grid will probably need to change for that to happen. However, piloting climate-smart countryside projects is in the national development plan. This type of thing has happened in other countries. Ireland can learn from what has happened elsewhere to speed up the implementation of these projects.

Senator Mac Lochlainn mentioned the regional issue. There are some interesting maps of the country on pages 12 and 13 of the EPA submission. They show that certain environmental issues, particularly water and nature, vary from one part of the country to another. The maps on page 12 deal with water quality. One can see that most of the water quality problems are in the east of the country, that is, the north east, the east and the south east. There are more people living in those areas and more intensive agriculture. The second map shows the most pristine waters remaining in Ireland. Most of them are in the west, where there are fewer people and less intensive agriculture.

On page 13 there is a map of what is called high nature value farming. That map shows the parts of the country that are more suitable for high nature value farming. Again, they are mainly in the west, north west and south west of the country. When it comes to reforming the Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, and designing the next version of it, the EPA would like to see more ways of incentivising the best type of farming for a given location. Again, this must be done in a manner which works for farmers. If it does not work for the farmer, it will not work. There are some really good examples of such projects. The Burren Life Programme is a high nature value farming project that works really well for the farmers in the Burren, in a way that was not happening 15 or 20 years ago.

Deputy Kenny had some questions on the forestry issue. If Ireland is to move towards carbon neutrality, which is the stated aim of Ireland's policy position for climate change for 2050, we have to figure out ways in which more trees can be grown in the country. I think the target in the national forestry strategy is to reach 18% of land cover. That figure is about 11% at the moment. This raises the question of who plants the trees. The planting is mostly done by farmers. If there are barriers which prevent that from happening, they need to discussed in collaboration with the people who are actually doing the work. Ways to remove these barriers must be figured out. I imagine that will be part of the discussion as the CAP starts to evolve.

Slurry storage was also mentioned. A potential solution to help with that is anaerobic digestion. This is the same thing I spoke about earlier when I raised the possibility of projects at scale for gas production. Such projects will not totally solve the problem, but would be an alternative to simply storing slurry on farms.