Steadfast is the word Taoiseach Micheál Martin used last November to describe his Government’s commitment to its climate obligations, invoking a sense of unwavering courage and focus in its approach. But the gap between this promised resolve and its actual performance is stark. In January, Minister for the Environment Darragh O’Brien admitted that Ireland will miss its 2030 climate targets by half. Even with emissions at their lowest in decades, the Government is nowhere near meeting our legally binding limits.
Ireland’s protected habitats and species are in free-fall, with about 90 per cent of them now failing, according to a December report. Underlying this collapse is a pattern of treating climate and nature as peripheral, marginal concerns, easily sidelined rather than recognised as urgent matters of national security.
Consider Iceland, which is inhabited in part because of the ocean current system that carries a vast conveyor belt of heat from the tropics, past Ireland, to Iceland, and back. This Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or Amoc, is weakening because of warming temperatures melting Greenland’s ice sheets, which then pour into the ocean, disrupting the current’s flow. Scientists warn the Amoc could collapse in just decades, wreaking havoc on infrastructure, transportation and food systems. This isn’t merely a scientific concern or an academic curiosity. It’s existential – “a matter of national survival and security”, according to Stefan Rahmstorf, a physical oceanographer and climatologist who has studied the Amoc at Potsdam University in Germany.
Before Christmas, the Icelandic government classified the potential collapse of the Amoc as a national security risk, demonstrating a belief that climate stability is fundamental to a nation’s survival. The message is clear: climate change should be prioritised as a security crisis, not just an environmental one.
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On that, the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee, on which heads of MI5 and MI6 sit, would surely agree. Last month, a partial version of its national security assessment of global biodiversity loss was published, and it came with a stark warning: some ecosystems will start to collapse “by 2030 or sooner”, posing an immediate threat to national security, prosperity, food systems and public health. There won’t be enough water for people to drink or food to eat; livelihoods will be lost; displacement and migration will accelerate, and geopolitical competition for resources will intensify. In short, environmental breakdown isn’t a distant possibility or a theoretical scenario; it’s a strategic threat that intelligence agencies now factor into their calculations, and it requires strategic planning, preparation and action. “Nature”, say the chiefs in the report, “is the foundation of national security.”
A PwC analysis found that 55 per cent of the world’s GDP, $58 trillion (€49.2 trillion) is reliant on nature. “Nature’s decline poses significant risks to the global economy and society at large if organisations do not transform their practices now.”
We’re in a race to hold on to the nature we have, to restore what we have lost, to limit our carbon emissions and suck as much carbon out of the atmosphere as we can.
In that, we need “no-regret strategies” – actions that work well across the board, regardless of how the future unfolds, that act as a kind of insurance policy against ecological collapse. Obvious examples are reducing carbon emissions, diversifying crops, slashing pollution and restoring our wetlands.
In Ireland, despite the grim reports of our failing habitats and emissions, there’s still a lot to play for. Take our bogs, which, if fully restored, could pull down carbon while supporting a significant number of species (they’re our Amazon rainforests) and helping reduce flood risk by soaking up vast quantities of excess rainwater during extreme weather.
We’re lucky to have world-class practitioners in nature restoration, such as Brendan Dunford, who pioneered the Burren Life Project, and Derek McLoughlin, who heads up the publicly funded Wild Atlantic Nature project in Mayo. They’re part of a growing community of scientists and project managers who understand how to restore nature and, perhaps more critically, know what it takes to gain the trust of farmers, landowners and locals to make it happen at scale on the ground.
There is also a challenge for the environmental and climate movements. Ecologists and conservationists can no longer rely on narrow appeals framed around individual species or habitats – the language of “save the otter”. Those arguments are too easily sidelined in macroeconomic debates. Nature and climate funding must now be articulated as infrastructure: as essential to food systems, public health, energy stability and geopolitical resilience. In security terms, biodiversity is not sentimental, it is strategic. We must now see environmental breakdown in the same way intelligence communities view it: as a primary driver of instability.
The most cost-effective and impactful way to protect our collective future is through large-scale restoration, which can only happen with a truly steadfast commitment of long-term funding in the billions. It’s peanuts compared to what the alternative would cost.
