 It's a pleasure to be here again, ladies and gentlemen. I work for, a very quick word, I work for Chakask, that's how you pronounce it, it's the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority. We do three things, we do research on agriculture in Ireland, we do farmer advisory or extension, if you like, and we do farm education together in one organisation. Now my role is to look after the translational research on sustainable food production. Sustainable food production speaks for itself. Translational research means bringing all the knowledge and data together and translating that into messages, mainly, I work mainly on the policy side. And also scanning the policy horizon and bringing that back in terms of identifying new research areas. And I'm very pleased to be here with my colleagues Gary and Trevor that I work very closely with in this context. Now today I'd like to zoom in on one aspect of sustainability and that is the hot topic of greenhouse gases from agriculture. Particularly in the context of the COP21 that will take place next month in Paris, that is the burning, excuse the burning topic. And we see a very strong debate in Ireland, also in Europe and indeed globally on where we're going with agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. And the debate, in my opinion, is stuck. We're not making much progress at the moment. We are on the science side, but in the public debate it is stuck. One side saying we need more food, we need food security, and the other side saying we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the only way to do that is less agriculture. Now what I'd like to do here today is to replace that question, do we need more agriculture or less agriculture, which is where the debate is stuck, with four questions, more nuanced questions that we can work on, that we can make progress on to try and get the best of those two worlds, more food, less greenhouse gas emissions. Now I'm preparing a paper on this topic with my colleagues in the FAO. And before we start writing the paper, I'd like to offer you some thoughts and I welcome the feedback before we start writing. So let me start, given that today is about European policies, let me start our story here with the latest conclusion from the European side, the European Council conclusion from last October. Climate and energy framework for 2030. And in my mind that's the most relevant horizon. Of course we've got the 2020 agreement, but 2020 is tomorrow and it will happen. So now we're looking at 2030 and the policy horizon. Now in those conclusions that dealt with the entire economy, coal from Poland and all sorts of things, but there's one paragraph dealing with agriculture, that's paragraph 2.14. And let me translate that for you, in very simple terms, there's three sentences there. And the first sentence states that agriculture or greenhouse gas emissions should not be reduced at the expense of food security. There's almost parity of esteem, if you like. Food security, very important, greenhouse gas emissions, very important. They should not be met at the expense of each other. Now how can we do that? How can we produce more food and at the same time reduce emissions? And what we've come up with is, and what we'd like to propose here today, is literally a new equation for climate smart agriculture. And we're going to indulge in some mathematics in an equation. I'll try and keep it simple. First let's look at food production. The amount of food we produce in the world depends on two things. One is, the first thing is what we call activity data, that is the number of hectares that we farm or the number of cows that we keep, and we multiply that with a productivity factor. The amount of, the number of tons of food we get from one hectare or the amount of milk we get from one pound. The amount of greenhouse gases that is derived from agriculture has a very similar equation. The amount of greenhouse gases depends on the activity. Again, number of hectares, number of cows, multiply what we now call emission intensity. So that is, for example, nitrous oxide emissions per hectare or methane emissions per cow. Now let's have a look at that. Let's investigate what we can do here. Let's first look at the productivity factor because if we increase productivity we can increase food. This is a famous map, global map, the yield gap map that shows the potential in various parts of the world to increase productivity. We see that in large parts of Europe and America that gap is close to zero or close to our potential yield, but there's other parts of the world that has huge potential to increase yields factor, if you like. Now if you want to put that into a picture, this is a project that we worked on, or visited as part of our work in Tanzania, and this is rain-fed rice production in Tanzania where we get one crop of rice, two tons per hectare, per crop is two tons per hectare per year. If you turn the camera the other way, literally on the other side of the road, irrigated, the introduction of technology, also introduction of knowledge packages through farmer field schools. Together, now they grow two crops of rice, four tons per hectare per year, eight tons per hectare of rice. That is the intensification. You'll be pleased to hear that this was a Dutch irrigation system. Next door was an American irrigation system that worked with pumps. Pumps broke down. The Dutch system was gravity-fed. It was Holland won American Hill. I'm going to come back to that. We can all agree it's a good thing to increase productivity. Now let's look at the activity data, the area in the world that we're firing. This is a paper published recently in Class 1, and you can see many different projections and simulations, but they all more or less tell the same thing. What we see here is the increase in productivity for four of the world's major crops, the historic growth in productivity. The solid line here is where we simply extrapolate the current increase in productivity into the future for each crop. The dotted line, however, is the increase that would be needed if we want to feed the growing population on the same area of agricultural land. That poses a challenge for us, and of course the error bars are enormous, but this suggests that the current increase in productivity may be insufficient to meet world demand by 2050, based on no change in diet, or on a continuation of current trends in diet. That poses the question, is there a need to increase the agricultural activity data? Okay, question mark. I'm going to park that here and we're going to compare it. Let's look at greenhouse gas emissions. First we look at the emission intensities. How can we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions per cow or per hectare? There's quite a few things we can do there. We can work on reducing nitrous oxides per hectare. We can reduce on methane emissions per cow, and this is where data from Ireland that shows that over the last 20 years we have reduced emission intensities, we've expressed it as carbon dioxide equivalents per calorie food produced. We've managed to reduce those through more efficient farming and we're projecting that we will continue to reduce that into the future. Okay, and we can agree that that is a good thing. Lower emission intensity is a good thing. But let's now look at the activity data. Here's the same green dots. The emission intensity is declining, but the yellow line here, projection, is for the total amount of food produced. And we're projecting that we will increase our food production. If you multiply the two, you get our greenhouse gas emissions and they are very stubborn. It's very hard to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions. Which in Ireland, oh sorry, before we go to Ireland, New Zealand's very same story. They've reduced the emission intensity of their milk, but they've increased more than doubled their milk production. As a result, their methane emissions in total is going up. Okay? As a result of that, there's a debate in Ireland whether there's a need to reduce agricultural activity if we can't manage to reduce our greenhouse gases just by reducing the intensity alone, is there a need to reduce activity? So now we come to the heart of the debate. Let's agree what we can agree on. More efficient productivity, everybody wants it. It's good. Lower emission intensity, everybody wants it. It's good. But where do we need higher activity data or lower activity data? That depends where you're coming from. Sometimes the solution to every calcitrant problem is to transcend it. It's to go one level higher where it doesn't become a conflict anymore. And I'm proposing that here we're doing that in the form of an equation because it's the A that is the equation, the activity data. So let's get rid of it. We substitute it. And we get a new equation for greenhouse gases and food security. And this is where we think we can make progress. Now the amount of greenhouse gases from agriculture depends on three things. The food we eat, the emission intensity and the productivity. And let me take them one by one because this is the heart of the debate. Which food do we want to eat? Let me first show you one side of the story and let's get the elephant out of the room. In Europe we eat too much meat. We eat too much animal protein. Let's be straight about that. In fact in many countries the animal protein consumption exceeds total protein requirements. As I'm using the WHO here as the guide. Also the other truth, inconvenient truth, is that livestock production worldwide contributes to about 17% of total calorie intake but is responsible for almost 80% of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. So that when you look at those graphs that does not look good. Based on that we've seen studies, very good studies. This is from Pete Smith's team in Scotland. That indeed show that how can we reduce emissions from agriculture? Well if you look at what we can do on the farm, there's very little we can do. 20% to 4% progress. If you look at consumption, changing consumption patterns, we can make more than double the progress. So that paper, very influential paper is saying we should focus on consumption patterns rather than production patterns. But here's the other side of the story. This is a graph by Westhoek, I put in all these Dutch references into the presentation. It's a very famous graph by Westhoek from the Protein, please see it off. Protein puzzle, very influential book. What we've been talking about in the last few slides is here. It's Europe and North America. Our protein consumption exceeds what we need. Very large parts of the world, protein consumption is well below what is recommended by the WHO. And those are the parts with the largest populations. For example, this is Mali, and Niger, I think, if I know my flanks. I think that if we consider that, then the question is do we need more or do we need less is the wrong question. Do we need more or less livestock produce is the wrong question. I want to divide this debate on livestock produce into three different classes. Let me first take out milk. Milk has an important role in food security, particularly the first 200 days, no, not 200 days, thousand days of childhood, famous, famous notion. This is a study from Sweden where they compared the nutrient density index of many different drinks. So that's the inverse of greenhouse gas footprint, if you like it. How many nutrients do you get for one kilo of greenhouse gas? And it shows that milk gives you more nutrients per greenhouse gas than many of the other drinks. Now for some that's not surprised, beer is in here, but maybe a bit surprising is that milk gives you more nutrients than soya, than the equivalent soya drink, per kilogram of greenhouse gas. And what I propose is that let's park milk for the moment because it has a role in food security. The second group that we then can look at is monogas fix, pigs and poultry. On the face of it, the footprint of monogastrics is very small. They have low emissions per kilogram meat, they have a low water demand per kilogram meat, and they are efficient converters of plant protein into animal protein. But, there's one but, they compete with us for cereals. They compete for arable land with us. They leave us with the remnants which have very bad statistics, very high greenhouse gas footprint, very high water footprint, but they have one trick up their sleeve. They can convert inedible protein that you and I cannot eat into something we can eat. And the question is without ruminants, if we would ban ruminants, what would we do with our grasslands? What would we do with the Dutch colders? What would we do with our mountain landscapes? The vast areas in Africa and Asia, and indeed the United States, that are covered by grass, what would we do with them? Some people say we should plow it up and grow crops. It's more efficient. Well, the last time anybody tried that was in the United States, and we know the results of that. Plowing up grassland, permanent grassland for arable production is a climate time bomb. It will take 100 years before you earn that back in terms of your carbon credits. So, my first handle, I'm going to call them handles, is should we replace that original question, more livestock produce, less livestock produce, should we replace that with a question that we can make more progress on? And for me that is which food, for whom, grown where? That is something we can work on. Back to the equation. The second point I'd like to look at is the productivity. How productive we use our land and our animals. In the context of greenhouse gases, we produced in Ireland in 2012 what we call a marginal-backed cost graph agriculture. So it's where we looked at what measures can we roll out on farms to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint. We ranked them by cost effectiveness. So the width of each measure tells you how much progress you can make in greenhouse gas reductions, how many credits you can get if you like, and the direction whether they're going down or up tells you whether a measure is cost beneficial or expensive. And that's how we've ranked them. We've color coded them and we didn't color code them by measures on the left are green and on the right are blue. The measures are measures based on efficiency. Increased farm efficiency. For example, weight gain, accelerated weight gain in the beef economic breeding index, improved the economic breeding index in dairy systems, extended grazing, nitrogen efficiency and all those efficiency measures there's no surprise, pay themselves back. Good for the pocket and good for the greenhouse gases. Now that was the theory, but our colleagues in Edwin Ryan, who is with us, have also measured that in our national farm survey. That's part of the farm network. So they measured the economic performance of dairy farms, bottom third economic performance mean and the top third and they measured the carbon footprint or calculated carbon footprint of those farms. They measured that the economic, the best economic performance have the lowest carbon footprint. And in greenhouse gases, it's a bit of paradox. Intensification, intensive production practices usually reduce the carbon footprint. Intensification reduced carbon footprint. Now, I can see Michael being worried there and correctly so. Because we have to keep an eye on the other aspects of sustainability. Because intensification isn't usually not good for water quality. It's usually not good for biodiversity. So my handle that I propose here is how can we ensure that intensification is sustainable intensification. That is where we need a lot more thought, a lot more research and a lot more effort to make sure that sustainable intensification is indeed sustainable. Emission intensity. We can, back to this slide, we can reduce, there's things we can do technological solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, this is work from Gary and colleagues in Johnson and Castle where we're working on novel fertilizer formulations. This is the standard calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer and it's the nitrous oxide emissions associated with that. With these novel fertilizers you can significantly reduce nitrous oxide emissions from these fertilizers without yield penalty. That's a technological solution. The challenge here is that so far blue here are the technological solutions are expensive particularly for the farmer. Now these costs are changing the novel fertilizers are becoming cheaper but like computers. So next year we'll do an update of this new marginal begon cost curve but in general the handle that we or the question that we should ask how can we reduce the cost of technological solutions? That's my third handle that we can make progress on. Okay, we've dealt with the equation and that was the first sentence of the European Council conclusions. I'll be quicker with the second sentence. The second sentence basically says we need policies where we not only count negative aspects of agriculture on greenhouse gases but also the positive. Now what do we mean by that? This is the field behind my house unfortunate and what we measure in our inventories is the negative emissions so the bad emissions. Methane from animals ammonia from animals nitrate from soils they are the ones that include it in the inventories. We know that agriculture also does other things it sequesters carbon we can sequester carbon with farm forestry and we can offset some of our fossil fuel emissions by using bioenergy or forest bioproducts etc bioenergy generation. What the European Council conclusion in principle proposes is that we not only count the bad emissions but also bring in the good aspects of land management. What does that mean? There's a lot of misunderstanding about what that means. Some people in the press in Ireland say Ireland is looking for a free pass no, it's not what it means. It simply means that we'll have more tools available in our toolbox. Because now we can work not only on reducing these bad emissions but also try and work on increasing the good aspects of farming that previously we didn't get credit for in our inventories. Now what is that until land management, these good aspects? We did a scoping study where we looked at forestry currently our forestry is on a good sync but as our Kyoto forests are maturing that sync potential actually in business as usual scenario is projected to decline. We also know that our grasslands are sequestering carbon but because they're already sequestering so much it's actually very difficult to increase that rate. But certainly what we can do is work on drained organic soils which are a source of greenhouse gas emissions where organic soils were drained in the past oxygen was allowed to enter also there's also a very relevant discussion in the Netherlands Previously that wasn't thought to be a big problem but with the new IPCC guidelines the default emission factors from drained organic soils was increased from about one ton per hectare to 19 tons per hectare. So where previously we thought it was a little source now we think they're giant hotspots. Very relevant for the Dutch boulders. Also very relevant for Ireland where we've seen a lot of drainage in the past. So we need to add to our equation now we need to add the change net change in carbon stock in our soils. That is the fourth handle that we can work with. Because the first thing we should do is plug the carbon leaks. This is a study we've done where we were able to model the benefits and costs of drainage. Now the benefits are clear when we drain land it increases the primary productivity and the number of days that we can graze the land. Traffical days. And we know that for every day extra grazing we earn about 5 euros per hectare. So if we extend it by 30 days that's 150 euros per year. We also know that drainage comes at the expense of carbon loss and more in some areas and less in other areas. So now we can ask here are the benefits for the different areas of drainage. Here are the costs in terms of carbon loss. What is the ratio? Where is that balance? Where is the optimum? This didn't work the last time either. There's the slide that I do apologize. This is a Windows 2 MacBook problem where I had an animation where you see the map changing color. Basically I have to tell you that basically it depends on carbon price. At the current carbon price which is very low, I think 7 euros per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent on the international market at the current price the economic benefits of draining far outweigh the carbon penalty. Joe asked me a question the last time are you using the right price? Even if we use a price of 30 euros per ton it still outweighs. But if the price goes in the direction of 100 euros per ton then the equation now the carbon penalties exceed the economic benefit. Now for me that informs the debate and of course I have to keep in mind that for the farmer only experiences one side of the equation the benefits because the penalties don't apply to the farm level. The state experiences the other side of the equation so there's an interesting debate to be had. Right. The other thing we can do is enhance sequestration and this way the department has recently published a new forestation scheme incentive for farmers to increase forestry. We give you to making sure that that same potential doesn't decline. So the fourth handle the last handle is how can the integrated land management because that's what we're talking about an integration of the agricultural productivity with how we manage our land and the carbon in our land how can we govern that? There's a lot of work to be done there. Now the final sentence very briefly in the council conclusions basically says we don't know yet how to do this but we'll come up with a plan before 2020 and technically to investigate this the commission started that process with a consultation, a public consultation on how this can best be done we made a submission ourselves the Department of Agriculture made a submission and many around us here made their own submissions and the commission is now finalising that into a new proposal for how we can account for integrated land for the Lula CF sector effectively within the 2030 climate framework. Now of course all of this is in preparation of Paris next month where the UNF Triple C will or will not but hopefully will agree on its own roadmap for agriculture. Of course the French host is very strongly advocating the 4.000 initiative the 4.000 to increase soil carbon by 4.000 units and our own what we discussed here about land management is reasonably well aligned with the French proposal now that leaves me with my conclusions we started with the debate on do we need more agriculture or less agriculture do we need more livestock or less livestock that's where the debate is stuck what I propose is that we move the debate to 4 discussion points that we can make progress on as a society one is do we need for whom produce well that's a debate where we can make progress the second one is can we make sure that intensification is indeed sustainable intensification and how do we do that the third question is can we reduce the cost of technological solutions how can we do that and you go into the whole innovation sphere how can we govern integrated land management in terms of plugging carbon sources and increasing things now I hope that if in the public debate we can move to these questions that we can progress towards a common shared goal thank you very much for your attention