Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)
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I am back. May I be allowed to come back in? I will have to leave in five minutes. I have a concern about woody riparian strips. Something we have talked about is ensuring we do not end up with thin areas because we know there are new grant schemes coming in that area from the forestry legislation that is going through at the moment. We do not want people removing existing biodiversity in order to benefit from a grant to plant a woody riparian strip. That is one concern I have in the mitigation area.

My main concern is the net-zero piece. We need to consider these things in the context of land use, land use change and forestry, LULUCF. There are measures and practices at UN and international level to measure that. I am concerned by, for example, the partnership with Accenture and others. I am concerned about individual accounting systems that are calculating things as net zero when we know Ireland is currently a net emitter in terms of land use and forestry. We talk about incentives, and I am in favour of incentives and measures to support change in agriculture, but I am concerned about our carbon emissions in the context of the hard, ultimate science on which our survival depends. I am concerned about moving carbon around on spreadsheets. We are finding new ways to count carbon as sequestered, which is not helping us with our overall reduction targets but deals with carbon that was there already and is being relabelled. I would like to avoid situations which allow us to treat carbon as the incentive and to treat the carbon emission measurement system as the incentive structure rather than regarding our carbon emission limits as the outside frame within which our economy and agricultural activity sits. We must give people incentives in order to reduce those emissions. I worry about the trading carbon piece. When we make it a speculative commodity and find ways to offset emissions and get into that area, it is being used to incentivise economic change when economic change should be used to deliver the emission reduction budgets. How that is framed is important. I say that in the context of being in favour of investing in this area. Much of the science is about land use. Under the LULUCF approach, the idea of changing what we are doing with land is still a difficult subject in Ireland. We may have to consider using more land for crops for reasons of food security. We know that the current dairy model works very well for some businesses and large farmers but it does not work very well in giving security to many small farms. Taking a similar approach and applying the same kind of great science that is at the moment focused on the livestock area to land change measures, and using public subsidies in that area, is something to pursue. I know there is a bit of that in the silvopasture and targeted planting but there is space for further expansion in that regard. I just wanted to indicate my concerns about the net zero piece.