The Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment has published the draft document and opened a public consultation on what will become Ireland’s first statutory set of measures to tackle climate change.Although agriculture accounts for one third of national greenhouse gas emissions, the majority of measures considered under the plan focus on other sectors such as transport, electricity generation and energy use in buildings. This is in recognition of the fact that “balancing the environmental objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the economic and social objective of promoting the sustainable development of a rural economy is critical,” the draft plan reads. “Farming involves complex natural cycles, and mitigation in agriculture cannot be addressed, as in other sectors, by one-off technological fixes,” it adds.
The Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment has published the draft document and opened a public consultation on what will become Ireland’s first statutory set of measures to tackle climate change.
Although agriculture accounts for one third of national greenhouse gas emissions, the majority of measures considered under the plan focus on other sectors such as transport, electricity generation and energy use in buildings. This is in recognition of the fact that “balancing the environmental objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the economic and social objective of promoting the sustainable development of a rural economy is critical,” the draft plan reads. “Farming involves complex natural cycles, and mitigation in agriculture cannot be addressed, as in other sectors, by one-off technological fixes,” it adds.
”Carbon neutrality” objective
Ireland must cut its emissions from those combined sectors by 20% over the period 2005-2020. Projections under existing policy show that emissions from agriculture will “flat-line at best” over this period as they fell during the milk quota era, but are now rising again. “The long-term ambition is to move towards an approach to carbon neutrality which does not compromise capacity for sustainable food production,” the plan states. This means keeping emissions stable while growing production. Three avenues are proposed to achieve this:
Switch fertiliser to protected urea. Emissions from soils represent 31% of all greenhouse gases from agriculture. This is largely nitrous oxide released through fertiliser application. The plan quotes “research showing that switching to a protected urea product can be effective in reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and ammonia emissions”.Store carbon in forests. Ireland already has a policy to expand forest cover from current 11% of the land area to 18% in 2050. “The current forestry programme envisages afforestation of 7,140ha in 2017, increasing incrementally to 8,290ha in 2020,” the plan notes. It adds that under EU accounting rules, the forestry planted up until 2020 will remove 4.5mt CO2 from the atmosphere each year. Under proposed EU targets for the period 2020-2030, half of these removals could then be offset against emissions from agriculture, effectively recognising that the trees we plant remove part of the greenhouse gases released by Irish agriculture. Although this will only contribute towards a fraction of Ireland’s targets, it is identified as one of the cheapest ways of tackling emissions, at €20/t of CO2 removed from the atmosphere.Continue existing agri-environmental programmes. The draft plan lists a series of measures including GLAS and the Carbon Navigator among those currently contributing to controlling greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Farmers can expect more of the same from CAP and Government policy in the future, as well as knowledge transfer programmes to address the fact that “many of the measures to mitigate agricultural emissions are dependent on behavioural change, from farmers in particular”. Research in areas ranging from livestock nutrition to manure management and carbon sequestration in soils will shape future schemes to support the most carbon-efficient ways of farming.Members of the public are invited to take part in the consultation until 26 April before the climate mitigation plan is finalised. The exercise is then due to be renewed at least every five years until 2050.
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