Professor Hannah Daly:

I watched that session and I am afraid I did not understand the claim that the new approach was recommended or was favoured by the IPCC. The IPCC absolutely does not recommend metrics. That is up to individual governments and requires not just approaching metrics in different ways, it also requires ethical assessments, as we have presented, arguments which are under the Paris Agreement, scientific adequacy and our equitable share to the Paris Agreement. I suggest going back to the council and asking for clarity on that matter.

The sectors most affected by far are the agriculture and land use sectors because, currently, the scenarios that were shortlisted by the climate council assume, inherently, a rather strong growth in dairy output. All of the scenarios that were shortlisted by the council assume something between 28% and 48% growth in dairy output by 2050. There might be a stabilisation or small growth in the overall ruminant herd but that is predicated on a very strong decline in the suckler herd. The question is, going back to the economic imperative versus the climate imperative, are we changing the metric for 2050 to basically enable the continued growth in one of the most carbon-intensive sectors we have in Ireland?