Dr. James Moran:

On the carbon market, it is not that we should not trade if we have a net sink, but that, at the moment, within our agriculture, forestry, and other land use sectors, we have no credits to trade. Our balance sheet is in serious debit, so the credits do not exist. Any trading of this is only paper trading and would only be greenwashing by other sectors to avoid reduction in fossil fuel use. That should be a clear point. We are emitting more than 27,000 kt of carbon from our agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors, when we include emissions from our peatlands. As was pointed out last week, improvements in measurements might reduce that figure, but it will certainly not turn it from a serious debit into a credit. In the medium to long term, the credits do not exist. Anybody who says they do is only greenwashing. That said, there are many situations where we have to incentivise individual parcels of land to move into credit. We have parcels of land in the country that are in credit. With carbon farming, we need to develop an incentive system that rewards individual farmers who have parcels of land that are in credit for moving more parcels of land into that system.

I say we are further along because we have developed our results-based farming systems for environmental quality, with an integrated approach to soil quality, hydrological quality and ecosystem quality, with regard to biodiversity value, in our results-based payments system in the Burren. The structures are set up. Based on our existing ten-point scoring systems, where we are restoring the ecosystem quality, we need to understand and quantify what exactly the carbon storage is and the annual carbon sequestration in each of these different land types under different ecological qualities. We have the payment systems. We are scaling this up to 20,000 farmers in eight co-operation project areas over the next months. This is why I am saying we are further along the trajectory. Once we have the quality of the landscapes secured through public finances, then we can look at the other opportunities relating to paludiculture and developing new and novel projects, similar to Professor Joosten's work in Germany. We have a readymade local co-operation project approach that this can be tagged onto to develop carbon farming systems.