Ms Sadhbh O'Neill:

I hear the Deputy's frustration and I understand the desire to reconcile these different perspectives. It is important to stress that the report is extremely valuable and it is worth diving into the detail. The committee could usefully explore each chapter separately and dive into it to try to get answers to a lot of these questions. There is a great deal of complexity, which is not the same thing as data gaps. There are plenty of data; it is a question of how we interpret them and how they are used to inform policy decisions. One of the things I have picked up while reading the report is the need for a very catchment-specific approach for the different types of water bodies and soils and the different impacts as a result when you plant trees and engage in land use activity. We have to get into a detailed mapping exercise rather than engage in generalisations. That is on all of us.

To go back to the doubt the Deputy expressed, the issue with carbon markets is that we are trying to convince ourselves that we can offset the CO2 emissions, which are essentially permanent over human timescales, with land use removals. Unfortunately, while the practices themselves involve very good activities that are beneficial to nature in lots of ways, they do not necessarily permanently store the carbon or reliably store it and do not do it in a way that can be measured in the sense needed in order to justify creating a carbon credit. That is not to rule out other types of market instruments, however. For example, one of the things we should be looking at is the ending of all fossil fuel subsidies and the ending of all environmentally damaging subsidies, some of which are still included in the CAP scheme. There is lots we can do to reform our existing financing of climate action and environmental action without having to resort to measures like carbon farming, which are dubious and impermanent.