Dr. James Moran:

I thank the committee for the invitation to present this statement. Apologies that I cannot be there in person. I am a senior lecturer in biology and ecology in the department of natural resources and the environment at the Atlantic Technological University, ATU, in Galway. I lead the agro-ecology and rural development, ARD, research group. The group concentrates on sustainable agricultural and land use systems with a focus on the Common Agriculture Policy and improving agri-environment policy and practice.

I will concentrate on several key topics relating to the demands on our land base to contribute to enhanced climate action and nature restoration while maintaining viable food and fibre production. To respond to these needs as a society, we need to work within an integrated land use framework and be cognisant of the need to adopt an adaptive management approach, essentially learning while doing. This will require large-scale changes to our land use system over the next 30 years, which society can only achieve with clear direction and leadership from Government and whole-of-government supports. This requires substantial institutional innovation and capacity building. We have seen local communities and individuals across the country take the lead. We must create an enabling environment where local action is fostered and takes place within and contributes to larger regional and national land use transformation. This needs to take place as part of an integrated land use strategy with clear land use targets and goals over the short term, five years, medium term, 30 years, and long term, inter-generational time horizons.

We must start from the fundamental realisation that we have to achieve this for the survival of human society. We must respond with urgent action to the interrelated climate and biodiversity crises that were acknowledged in the Government declaration on the climate and biodiversity emergency more than three years ago. We must also recognise, as I informed the committee in November 2021, that Ireland has a diverse mix of landscapes characterised by differences in geology, topography, soils, climatic variation and land cover, with a wide range in land use capacity. One size does not fit all and different land types are advantaged to provide particular services, for example: high quantities of food and fibre; carbon storage; flood alleviation; space for nature; amenity; and recreational value. We must create a system which recognises the different capacities of our diverse land base and where it is possible for different areas to capitalise on their natural advantages.

In February 2022, we began a six-month contract awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, to undertake a land use evidence review research project as part of phase 1 of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications national land use evidence review. The project was led by my colleague, Dr. Eamon Haughey, at ATU and involved collaboration with Dr. David Styles from the University of Galway, Dr. Matt Saunders from Trinity Colleague Dublin and Ms. Ruth Bennett Coady from ATU. The report provides: an overview of current land cover, land use and trends in Ireland; a review of overall agriculture and land use, land use change and forestry, LULUCF; greenhouse gas fluxes; climate change scenarios and their impact on ecosystem functioning; modelling of land use change scenarios for net zero by 2050; and possible synergies and trade-offs resulting from land use change for net zero, together with options to support policy development. The report highlights that there are substantial differences in the dominant land cover classes between regions. The agriculture, forestry and other land use, AFOLU, sector was a significant net source of greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland during the period 2016 to 2020, with an average of 27,707 ± 888 kt CO2 equivalent per year.

Within this, forest land and associated harvested wood products provide an important net sink despite forest on peatland being a source. Grasslands on mineral soils are also a net sink but are outweighed by emissions from grasslands on peat soils.

The Government has committed to achieve net zero by 2050 and the report explores land use change scenarios to reach net zero in the AFOLU sector by 2050. It must be noted that there are proposals under the EU Fit for 55 package to amend the LULUCF regulation to merge the LULUCF sector and non-CO2 agriculture sector into a new climate pillar. This new pillar would have a target of climate neutrality by 2035 and a target for negative emissions thereafter.

To explore land use change scenarios required to reach AFOLU net zero by 2050, several scenarios were developed based on the general overview for a back-casting approach of livestock intensification, GOBLIN, model approach and a set of simplified baseline assumptions. Recognising the inherent simplification in this scenario modelling approach, the exercise highlights the scale of the land use change required to reach net zero in AFOLU by 2050. Even when methane was excluded, it was only possible to reach net zero in AFOLU by 2050 by including each of the following measures: increased livestock production efficiency resulting in 30% emissions reduction; reducing ruminant livestock numbers by up to 30%; ambitious organic soil rewetting or raising water tables on up to 90% of drained organic soils; and 500,000 ha of additional forest area by 2050.

The report explores the potential impacts of this land use change on biodiversity and water resources. Without effective spatial targeting and subsequent land management, there is potential for substantial trade-offs for biodiversity and water. This level of change in the AFOLU system is urgently required and we must not delay in putting plans in place to deliver the required change. Through lack of action, we have already put ourselves in a position such that our emissions in the AFOLU sector have risen rather than declined in recent years. This makes the required changes even more difficult to achieve and increases the risk that, in meeting net zero targets, there could be major unintended consequences for water quality and biodiversity as well as many other provisioning and non-provisioning ecosystem services, ultimately making the situation worse in the medium and long term.

With regard to land use in Ireland, we cannot move from a situation of production tunnel vision to one of carbon tunnel vision. We must have an integrated land use developed by Government in 2023. Continued biodiversity loss has the potential to limit the effectiveness of mitigation measures and will further reduce the resilience of ecosystems to climate change extremes. The report highlights that, for successful climate change mitigation and for measures to have significant co-benefits for biodiversity, water quality and water regulation, a range of site-specific conditions must be considered. This ultimately requires site-by-site planning and management, with land use targeted to meet multiple goals, cognisant of the baseline condition and capacity of the site. This must be cognisant of trade-offs and synergies to balance environmental, social and economic outcomes.

Analysis of some key current policy documents highlights that, in many cases, various existing policy targets are not aligned or consistent with the level of land use change required to meet AFOLU net zero by 2050. There is scope for climate action to be deployed across the land use sector but there must be more effective knowledge sharing and innovation development with land managers to enable effective and timely climate actions. An enabling environment is required and important knowledge gaps that hamper rapid progress across multiple sectors must be addressed. These include the need for more detailed data on land cover and land use - a new high-resolution national land cover map from Ordnance Survey Ireland and the Environmental Protection Agency is expected in November 2022 - and more detailed information on soil carbon fluxes across land cover types. There is also currently uncertainty with regard to climate impacts on the land system and the contribution of areas of semi-natural vegetation to climate mitigation.

From what I have outlined, it is clear there is currently no carbon credit in the AFOLU sector nationally as we have a significant debit on our AFOLU greenhouse gas balance sheet. Given current land cover and land use practices, and even with improved measurement and significant land use change, we are unlikely to have any carbon credits in the AFOLU sector in the medium term. However, this national AFOLU greenhouse gas balance sheet masks the substantial variation between individual land parcels and farms which have different land cover and land management practices. To enable and incentivise positive land use management, we must urgently create an enabling policy environment for action by local communities.

I will finish with some observations on carbon farming, which is essentially agriculture practices that remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soil, and by highlighting that we are further along the development pathway in relation to carbon farming initiatives in Ireland than is generally understood. Understanding what we know from the evidence I have given, these carbon removals should not be traded in the carbon markets, thereby allowing other sectors outside AFOLU to offset their emissions and potentially avoid emissions reductions within their sectors. Carbon credits essentially do not currently exist in the land use sector.

One of the most promising carbon farming measures is the conservation and restoration of peatlands, which also has significant potential co-benefits for biodiversity. It also has significant potential for climate change adaptation, building resilience of catchments to flooding from predicted more frequent extreme weather events associated with climate change. Ireland has a number of pilot results-based payment programmes under way, including the Wild Atlantic Nature LIFE Integrated Project, which targets blanket bog landscapes in west and north west, and the FarmPEAT European Innovation Partnership, which targets raised bog landscapes in the midlands.

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is also in the process of rolling out the agri-climate rural environment scheme, ACRES, co-operation project, which includes results-based payments for peatlands together with supporting actions and landscape measures to enhance their quality. The results-based approach is highlighted as a promising and feasible mechanism to incentivise carbon farming in a technical guidance handbook on results-based carbon mechanisms produced last year for the European Commission. This handbook specifically highlights the potential of the hybrid results-based model and references development work in Ireland spearheaded by the Burren programme for biodiversity and water. The guidance handbook also highlights the possibility for, and potential of, quantifying co-benefits for other ecosystem services besides carbon storage via bundling and grouping of ecosystem services together in one package. The locally adapted results-based payments projects in Ireland have already adopted an integrated approach with field scoring systems designed to incentivise nature, water and carbon ecosystem services within ten-point field scoring systems. This is set to be rolled out across peatland areas within the eight ACRES co-operation project areas under Ireland’s Common Agricultural Policy strategic plan for the period from 2023 to 2027. ACRES is not without its challenges but Ireland is demonstrating ambition in this area and we must all work to ensure a proven impactful approach at local scale can now be scaled up within a national framework. More work is needed to quantify the exact carbon benefits associated with individual field scores, but we can combine more extensive monitoring with existing field scoring systems, essentially learning while doing and adopting an adaptive management approach. We must build on this work and not start from scratch with carbon farming initiatives.