Sir, – Ireland’s Climate Change Assessment (ICCA), not before time, calls for an increased focus on climate adaptation measures and states that implementation is fragmented and currently too slow (“Ireland’s big climate change challenge set out in stark detail in unprecedented assessment”, Analysis, January 25th).
For several years, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been calling for countries to direct resources to adapt and protect vulnerable coasts, infrastructure, cities and towns against increasingly frequent and violent storms and sea level rises due to global warming.
The current catastrophic level of coastal erosion round our exposed coastal areas clearly demonstrates that authorities have been apathetic and totally remiss in addressing the problem.
It is regrettable that the assessment doesn’t give any direction on the way forward to curb the destruction and eradicate further irreversible damage.
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Neither does the assessment comment on the current policy of large-scale residential and commercial developments in low-lying dockland areas of our main cities, particularly in Cork city, which historically and today, are subject to frequent serious flooding.
While the momentous events outlined in the assessment cause serious infrastructural damage throughout the island, the report is less clear as to Ireland’s contribution to the causes and origins of global warming.
Evidence shows that global warming develops far from our shores and are caused by the major historical and current greenhouse gas polluters in the G7 and G20 countries, most notably the US, China, Russia, UK, India, and the EU, among others.
Ireland’s carbon footprint is tiny – data from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that our contribution to global warming is a mere 0.1 per cent of the world total. Also, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, according to Statista.com, Ireland lies a lowly 16th out of the 27 EU countries.
Clearly, Ireland with an area of 0.054 per cent of the global land mass has minimal impact on global warming, but we import and will continue to receive the worst effects as a small island off Europe.
In this context, any of the measures outlined in the assessment to achieve the Coalition’s “most ambitious climate change programme in the world’' will be of no avail and a gross waste of taxpayers’ money, if the main global polluters continue to pump billions of tonnes of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
Despite the best inducements of the assessment, it is now generally accepted by the Environmental Protection Agency and others that Ireland will not achieve its lofty 2030 goals of a 51 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which will certainly result in fines and penalties of €8 billion to €10 billion.
Ireland would be well advised to follow the IPCC advice that countries should address global warming commensurate with their contribution and means.
Would it not be more prudent therefore to renegotiate a longer time-frame to attain promised goals and achieve more broad-based and cross-societal support in the process? – Yours, etc,
JOHN LEAHY,
Cork.