Dr. Martha O'Hagan-Luff:

The Deputy asks a valid question. The carbon offset market has, in an unmitigated way, not been a success. One would proceed with caution but we need private sector funding to solve this and to invest in nature. We cannot just walk away and leave nature. We need to restore it and to help it to regenerate. Money is needed in order to restore it. There is a moral responsibility for businesses to contribute to that because we have all benefited from extracting from nature. It is about how best to do that. I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Carbon offsets have not been successful, so people would rightly proceed with caution with this, but it is a useful tool to get that capital, if we can.

I completely agree with the resistance to the idea of valuing and commodification. Ideally, we would have rights of nature. We have human rights. Why do we not have rights of nature? There is a colonial viewpoint where we think we can just dominate something and extract. I think it is a tool. If we do not put any value on it, then it is zero on the balance sheet, and, unfortunately, balance sheets and spreadsheets start projects. If one was looking to build a block of flats in a car park or in an ancient oak woodland, at the minute, the only cost that one pays is having to take down those trees. Would it not be good to say that while the car park cost nothing, it caused €100 million in value in woodland to be destroyed and that woodland took 200 years to grow? I want that minus €100 million, or whatever, to be in the spreadsheet. It is hard to value. It is intangible. I go back to things like trying to value our investment in the arts and trying to choose the least tangible, but we still do it. We try to put a price on things because that is how the system works.