Ireland will ‘miss carbon budget targets’

Ireland will not meet the targets set out in its first two carbon budget periods “unless urgent action is taken immediately”, the Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) has warned.

In its Annual Review 2023, the CCAC says that, “at the current rate of policy implementation”, Ireland will miss its targets for both the 2021-2025 and 2026-2030 carbon budget periods “unless urgent action is taken immediately and emissions begin to fall much more rapidly”. The report states that, following a “concerning series of unprecedented climate events” in spring and summer 2023, such as record daily temperatures and sea surface temperatures, the Government’s pace of implementing agreed climate policy is “not acceptable given the existential threat and impact of climate change on society”.

The first task of the Government, the report states, is to “reduce and ultimately prevent emissions of greenhouse gases”, and to achieve this “there must be effective and consistent engagement with communities, ensuring there is a fair and equitable transition”.

With the signing of the Paris Agreement, Ireland was one of 190 states worldwide to pledge to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5oC, which led to the Government pledging to reduce emissions by 51 per cent by 2030 from 2018 levels and to be climate neutral no later than 2050. A key policy lever in the achievement of these goals is the formulation of carbon budgets, which represents the total amount of emissions that may be released during an agreed five-year period. The Government published its first carbon budgets, setting out three five-year periods from 2021 to 2035 and breaking the emissions ceilings down into six sectors, in 2022.

Controversial at the time of the publication of the carbon budgets, and now central to the CCAC’s recommendations for achieving the targets within, was the lack of a sectoral emissions ceiling for the land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) sector. While emissions ceilings were agreed for the five other sectors, a decision for LULUCF was deferred for 18 months in order to facilitate the finalisation of the Land Use Strategy, with the CCAC recommending a decrease between 37 per cent and 58 per cent from 2018 levels in the sector.

The lack of sectoral emissions ceiling for LULUCF is now key to the CCAC’s overall recommendations to halt the slide towards the missing of Ireland’s short-term climate targets. The first of the CCAC’s six overall recommendations states that the Government “must address areas of uncertainty in how Ireland will reduce its emissions” and specifically mentions that a LULUCF sectoral emissions ceiling “must be set, and it must be clear by how much each sector must reduce its emissions”.

In its five other overall recommendations, the CCAC states that the Government:

• “needs to identify and remove barriers to policy implementation by ensuring adequate funding and planning reform at scale and speed”;

• needs to implement key actions now “to prevent longer-term damage and increased costs to society and the economy”;

• must adopt “new approaches to reduce emissions”, particularly in the areas of retrofitting and renewable energy;

• should establish a just transition commission “to ensure that Ireland achieves its climate objectives in a way that is fair and equitable and protects vulnerable people and communities”; and

• should “support opportunities that reduce emissions and make Ireland better prepared for the impacts of climate change”.

Responding to the publication of the report, Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications Eamon Ryan TD said that the global heatwaves seen in summer 2023 were “truly scary”, that the CCAC’s advice was “good”, and that the Government needs to be more ambitious in order to ensure funding for climate action initiatives is prioritised.

Sectoral recommendations