Ireland’s climate change actions risk increasing global greenhouse gas emissions because of carbon leakage, food futurist Jack Bobo has said.

Bobo is the director of global food and water policy at the Nature Conservancy and was speaking at the Guild of Agricultural Journalists of Ireland Michael Dillon lecture, which was sponsored by Kerry Group, on Friday.

“Tomorrow if Ireland decided not to export beef, if beef demand doesn’t disappear in the rest of Europe, it is almost certain that Brazil will meet most of that demand and the emissions from Brazilian beef are higher.

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“So we need to keep in mind not just the sustainability story of one farm, or one business, or one country but how all of this plays together.

“Farmers have to deal with the exports, even though you’re exporting that emission somewhere else but then the energy gets charged to them too instead of the place that sent it to Ireland and that’s double accounting. If we don’t figure out a way of doing the proper accounting, we can’t possibly get to the right answer,” he said.

It is to get to 2050 without screwing up the planet, and if we do that in many ways we will be good forever

Bobo said the world will have options and opportunities to feed the world sustainably by 2050 and that the challenge is not to do better and better forever.

“It is to get to 2050 without screwing up the planet, and if we do that in many ways we will be good forever.

“The next 30 years are not just the most important 30 years there have ever been in the history of the agriculture. They’re the most important 30 years there will ever be in the history of agriculture.”