Dr. Karl Richards:

I will make a very quick comment. Deputy Whitmore asked a question about flooding. We are not doing any research on that. It is an area the Office of Public Works, OPW, has worked on for many decades. We had a recent workshop with the OPW and I am aware that this is an area it is considering. Teagasc is not operating at a national modelling scale. The Deputy is aware of the agricultural catchments programme. Again, that is part of our catchment hydrology and catchment water quality science but we have not upscaled that and we are not working on peatland soils within that programme. We have new projects that have started on rewetting where we are looking at the effect of different rewetting practices on the water table itself and the potential for the water table to influence emissions.

We have mentioned uncertainties regarding emissions but those uncertainties change with time. Going back to an earlier comment about carbon farming, one concern I have is the question, as climate change impacts Ireland in terms of changes in our rainfall and temperature cycles, as to whether it will increase or decrease carbon emissions coming from peatland soils. If we start to pay for a lot of things now, as we move into 2035 and 2040 we might start to get droughts occurring on bogs and on our mineral soils and that will have a major impact on their carbon-sink capacity. We know from our research that in the past decade, we have had two very dry years where our mineral soils switched from being a carbon sink to being a carbon source because the soil dried out. That is something that needs to be considered very carefully and this is where taking data from our observations and modelling it and combining it with climate models such as those worked on by the Icarus group within Maynooth University on Terrain-AI is the sort of work we need to be looking at to future-proof these things as well, so that we are not emitting CO2 at potentially the worst time climate-wise in the next two decades.