Time for talking tough on Climate

With the negotiations for government formation ongoing, An Taisce is calling on Fianna Fail and Fine Gael to get real on complying with the climate law that they themselves passed. The Irish Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act (2021) is genuinely world-leading in its intent, the challenge is to implement it rigorously.  

The Climate Act sets up a legally binding system of carbon budgets - over-arching limits to total Irish greenhouse gas emissions to be allowed over rolling five-year periods, across all areas and activities of society. Within each five-year budget, emissions are divvied up between various sectors.  

These “sectoral ceilings” limit emissions from each sector. To put it in household budget terms, the overall carbon budget is the “income available” and the sectoral ceilings are the planned “spending”. 

As the Climate Change Advisory Council has pointed out as recently as December 12, we are failing as a State to rise to the climate change challenge and are on course to miss our legally binding carbon budgets for 2030. CCAC Chair Marie Donnelly highlighted that we are facing the most significant change since the foundation of the State which will require strong political leadership to address, with significant ramping up of ambition and delivery across all sectors. 

However, the challenge of meeting our obligations under the Climate Act is even greater than that. Not only are we on course to blow our first two carbon budgets to 2030, the sectoral ceilings agreed by the last government already don’t add up to meet the 2030 budget, in fact they exceed it [1].  

Therefore, as a starting point, An Taisce calls on those engaging in Government formation talks and negotiating the Programme for Government to commit to fixing the sectoral ceilings so they align with the carbon budgets within the first 100 days of taking office. The rationale for this important ask is laid out in this An Taisce and DCU explainer. 

The time has come for tough talking and true leadership. 

NOTES 

[1] The exceedance of the budget comes from the inclusion of “unallocated emissions savings” - a Government decision that unspecified technological developments, unfolding over the time before the second budget period started, would significantly affect the relative feasibility of achieving additional reductions in different sectors. On that basis they “overallocated” emissions across the various sectors, but with a commitment that they expected to subsequently plan additional “emissions savings” in one or more specific sectors (i.e. that they would, at some point, revise one or more of the ceilings downward to come into compliance with the budget). So these required “additional” savings were merely being left “unallocated” between sectors as a temporary measure, pending more clarity on technologies, etc. These “unallocated emissions savings” that would have to be subsequently “allocated” represent an additional 13% over the total approved budget for 2026-2030. 

Furthermore, the Government failed to assign a ceiling to an entire sector - land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF). Recently, however, they did introduce what they describe as a “new approach” to LULUCF in the Climate Action Plan 2024. This new approach is based on an EU Regulation on LULUCF emissions that Ireland is already bound to, quite separately from our domestic climate law. The specific EU limit is arrived at via a formula that depends on emissions in certain previous years, not all of which are yet finalised. So the number arrived at by this “new approach” also increases the amount by which the sectoral ceilings are exceeding the overall carbon budget.