Professor Hannah Daly:

I thank Deputy Ahern. I will address briefly the Deputy's first question on whether I have engaged with the Minister. It was not directly but I have engaged with officials in his Department on the matter.

Second, on the Deputy's question on other EU countries, I am not aware of any other EU country that has taken this approach. Ireland has a far higher share of methane emissions in its inventory than other EU countries as a result of our livestock sector. As a result, around half of our emissions under the effort sharing regulation fall in the agriculture sector. In the documents I submitted, I suggest we look to the likes of Denmark where around one third of its entire greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture as well. Instead of redefining the metric in 2050 for climate neutrality, which is on the table here, the Danish Government has progressed to increase ambition, to bring forward the date of net zero and to target negative emissions by 2050. The evidence I have presented shows we will actually need to do this as well and it is not accounted for in our current carbon budgets. We can look to countries like New Zealand, whose Government has proposed temperature neutrality as an approach, but there has been strong scientific backlash against that.