Jim Pat Dwyer

Project Title: Quantifying the impacts of climate change mitigation policies on Irish agriculture and the wider economy: the importance of alternative emission metrics. 

Overview: Primary agriculture is a major source of Ireland’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with further emissions generated from activities related to agriculture, in particular the food processing industry. Irish Agriculture will be subjected to substantial changes in order to deliver its requirement for a 25% GHG emissions reduction by the end of this decade.

This project will develop a framework building on the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling approach to allow an economy-wide assessment of the impacts of climate change mitigation policies on the Irish economy and its detailed productive sectors, with the aim of providing guidance to policy makers implementing measures for Ireland to reach its emission reduction targets. The model will have a particular focus on agriculture’s sectoral and regional structure across Ireland and will be regionally-disaggregated according to the NUTS (Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics) classification.

Unlike other sectors, most of agriculture’s GHG emissions are in the form of methane and nitrous oxide rather than carbon dioxide. As climate change mitigation policy is complicated by the need for a common metric for the climate impact potential of these GHGs, a key element of this project will be to better understand the implications of using alternative emissions metrics to those currently in use. This could affect the amount of GHG emissions reductions that needs to be delivered by agriculture and could also have an impact on the extent of related economic activity in the wider economy.

Jim Pat has an MSc in Finance from Dublin City University, a BA in Physics from Trinity College Dublin and has almost ten years’ experience working in finance; between the credit union and banking sectors.

Programme Area: Agricultural Economics & Farm Surveys Department

Supervisors: Trevor Donnellan, Dr Kevin Hanrahan, Dr Ole Boysen, and Dr James Breen

Location: Teagasc Athenry, Co. Galway, & UCD

Funding Source: Teagasc