Professor Alan Matthews:

They are excellent questions. The Deputy is quite right about the trend in EU emissions. After an early fall in emissions after 1990, European emissions from agriculture have been more or less stable over the past two decades. That also has to do with incentives. As we are all aware, agriculture is covered in the so-called effort sharing sector. The EU climate architecture distinguishes between the energy sector and large industries, which are covered by the European emissions trading scheme, and the effort sharing sector, which includes buildings, transport, small industry, waste and agriculture. The land use sector also has its own set of rules and targets. As agricultural emissions are relatively small across the European Union as a whole - they are only 10% of total emissions - countries could effectively ignore the requirement to reduce agricultural emissions because they could achieve the effort sharing targets by reducing emissions from transport and buildings and so on. That helps explain why we have not seen more reductions at the European level. Apart from one or two countries, such as Denmark, there has not been that pressure to reduce agricultural emissions, although that is certainly going to happen now with the more ambitious EU targets for 2030.

I thank the Deputy for giving me an opportunity to explain the methane question. We need to reduce methane. In Ireland, methane makes up a significant proportion of our national greenhouse gas profile. Yes, methane has to be reduced. Otherwise we simply will not meet our 51% reduction target by 2030. One should remember that methane emissions from Irish agriculture have increased by 17% since 2011, so we have been increasing. However, if we had a stable level of methane emissions, in broad terms, then reducing methane below that stable level would contribute to cooling. It would have the same effect as carbon sequestration from a climate point of view. It would help pull warming gases out of the atmosphere. I will come to the point about carbon farming in a moment. We are proposing to pay farmers to sequester carbon in soils and wetlands. My argument is that, by applying that to agricultural methane, there is a case to be made for paying farmers to reduce those emissions rather than regulating or penalising that reduction. That is the way I would draw a line from the particular characteristics of methane to its policy implications. I ask the Deputy to please come back to me if I have not been clear.

As regards what scale of change is possible, significant land use changes such as shifting from agriculture to forestry or significantly ramping up renewable energy crops and so on will take time. We need to start now because in many cases the benefits will accrue to us after 2030, rather than in the immediate future. We need to start taking action now. In terms of livestock numbers, I see potential for quite rapid change because on many farms. the income from livestock farming comes almost entirely from transfers under the CAP. It is possible to safeguard farm incomes or even increase them by also paying, through eco-schemes, for biodiversity benefits, water quality benefits and so on. It is possible to maintain farm incomes and yet at the same time reduce livestock numbers, if we take into account that there are negative externalities that are not currently being priced adequately into the equation, if at all. I see potential for quite rapid change there.

On carbon farming, I am aware of the reservations environmental NGOs have about using carbon sequestration to offset fossil fuel emissions and seeing those as a one-to-one relationship. I am less concerned about that issue in the Irish context because our 51% reduction target is so ambitious that we will be doing everything we can to reduce fossil fuel emissions and that will not be sufficient to get us to 51%, so we also need to make use of the potential for carbon sequestration over this period. It is worth drawing the committee's attention to the fact that in the recently adopted European climate law, which enshrines the net-zero target for the European Union by 2050 into law, that target is a net one, as is the target of a 55% overall reduction by 2030 compared to 1990. The Commission is going to do two things that will have a bearing on the credibility of these removals. Later this year it will be bringing forward a communication on how carbon farming might operate in practice and it will also bring out a regulation looking at the framework for how credits from carbon farming could be used in the overall accounting framework to address the real danger of double-counting, to which Ms O'Neill has alerted us. These developments at European level have great relevance for us here in Ireland and we need to keep an eye on them.