Paying farmers up to €2,500/ha to sequester carbon in rewetted peatlands should be considered as part of a radical re-evaluation of national land-use policy, according to Fine Gael’s Richard Bruton.

The former minister for communications and climate change said Ireland’s ambitions of carbon neutrality by 2050 risked being derailed by emissions from clear-felled forests and drained wetlands, which he claimed could top 11m tonnes of carbon equivalent a year.

Bruton warned that forestry could only reduce the overall emissions from land use by 2m tonnes, even if Ireland doubled its annual forestry planting levels to 8,000ha.

He said action was therefore needed on the country’s drained peatlands and wetlands, which he said totalled 400,000ha, although the National Peatland Strategy puts it at 300,000ha.

“We must seriously examine how we can reward farmers for the carbon farming that is inherent in the two big challenges we have, one of which is to deliver forestry at probably more than double the target contained in the Minister of State’s [Pippa Hackett’s] strategy,” Bruton told the Dáil last Thursday. “We must also consider how we will succeed in restoring the peatlands, which are in grassland, and being used in such a way that they are accounting for 10m tonnes of emissions,” he added.

“If we take the 10m tonnes of emissions that are coming from 400,000ha and we value them at €100/t, that equates to €2,500/ha per year on those lands,” Bruton pointed out.

“No agricultural activity is yielding anything on that scale in terms of the potential rewards from carbon farming,” he said.

Bruton described Teagasc’s ’s inability to measure carbon removals by agriculture as “quite depressing”, but he said the sector “must think more creatively about how we devise a model where carbon farming is genuinely rewarded”.

The Fine Gael deputy said agriculture was unique in that it had the ability to reduce and sequester carbon, but he bemoaned the fact that a policy framework was not being created to reflect the “potential reward” for farmers.

Fitzmaurice claims carbon farming is ‘basically rewilding’

The concept of carbon farming was dismissed by Independent deputy Michael Fitzmaurice as “abandonment” and “rewilding”.

“I do not agree with the deputy [Richard Bruton] who spoke about how we will be carbon farming,” Fitzmaurice said during the Dáil debate.

“You can forget about a community if you are carbon farming, for the simple reason that it is abandonment,” he maintained.

“It is not going out driving in a sheep, a cow or a bullock. You do not have to be there because it is basically rewilding.

“You do not have to get up at night and go out with a flashlight looking for a calf in a ditch or whatever,” Fitzmaurice said.