Sir, – The current protest by farmers over a small cut to the permitted level of nitrogen fertiliser for a small number of farmers pales into insignificance after the implications of a letter received by our organisation last week from director general Kurt Vandenberghe, European Commission Directorate-General for Climate Action is considered.
The letter (which we have placed in the library on our website) was the response to a complaint from Friends of the Irish Environment about the failure of Ireland to fully account for greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) emissions from land use.
After a detailed investigation by the Joint Research Council (JRC), which employs over 2,500 scientists and experts from all over the world, the directorate found that Ireland was under-reporting using a “Tier 1″ generic metric for to assess greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from grasslands while forestry and other agricultural activities were correctly assessed under Tier II and Tier III which require country specific crop and fertiliser impacts to be assessed.
The current derogation row arises because of nitrogen fertiliser’s adverse cascading impacts on water.
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The GHG issue arises through the impact of nitrous oxide (N20) on the atmosphere where it is a GHG over 300 times more powerful over a hundred-year period than carbon dioxide (CO2). The application of nitrogen fertilisers to grasslands increases N20 emissions by between 20 per cent to 50 per cent. As grasslands cover 4.1 million hectares of Ireland and the Teagasc recommendation varies from 40kg/hectare to 306 kg/hectare, depending on stocking rate, the requirement to fully account for these emissions will be nothing less than devastating to Irish farmers. It also leaves in tatters agriculture’s current target for reductions in GHGs.
“Accurate, complete and transparent reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals is essential for tracking progress towards climate goals and ensuring that countries are held accountable for their emissions”, according to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 2021 Report on the Global Stocktake.
The use of Tier I for grassland GHG reporting and its implications has been well known within Teagasc and the EPA for many years. Frank O’Mara, the current head of Teagasc, was the lead author of an EPA report in 2007 that concluded, “Therefore, to move from a Tier 1 to a Tier 2 approach, further data from long-term multi-site (covering a range of soil types and N inputs) monitoring studies are required”.
It is not Teagasc or the EPA but our farmers who will have to pay the price for the failure to accurately report our GHGs. Because we did not act in time, it is hard to see how we can avoid herd reductions on a scale and speed that will dramatically dwarf any current estimates, making many farms unviable and further undermining the fabric of rural Ireland. – Yours, etc,
TONY LOWES,
Friends of the Irish Environment,
Eyeries,
Co Cork.