Companies wasting energy with focus on targets over action

There was good news on the climate change front on Wednesday — at least on the surface.

Leading Irish businesses continue to take a primary role in the transition to a low carbon economy, a report prepared by consultancy PwC for Business in the Community Ireland noted.

Separately, Repak, which helps business to meet their legal obligations on packaging recycling, said it surpassed all EU recycling and recovery targets in 2021. The figures look impressive. On glass, Repak recycled 86 per cent (against an EU target of 60 per cent). The figures for metal were 71 per cent (50 per cent), paper 84 per cent (60 per cent), plastics 31 per cent (22.5 per cent) and wood 69 per cent (15 per cent).

The news that this outperformance was for the 24th year in succession suggests the targets might need to be a bit more challenging. In any case, while recycling packaging in the market is good, it does not address the critical issue — the amount of packaging there in the first place and the energy used to produce it.

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And the leadership role cited in the PwC report appears to amount so far to little more than 49 companies “setting Science-Based Targets as part of a drive to net zero emissions”. It was unclear whether those capital letters were intended to emphasise the undoubted importance of the targets or of the companies’ commitment in setting them. Either way they remain just that, targets. And over 40 per cent of those firms have only got as far as “committing to set” targets

The 49 businesses were among 70 companies that have signed up to a “Pledge” (another capital letter) — large businesses apparently but still a tiny fraction of businesses that need to address their emissions. And what about the 30 per cent of vaunted pledge signatories who have yet to even commit to setting such targets?

Ireland is great at setting targets, or agreeing to ones set elsewhere. The evidence to date suggests it is nowhere near as good when it comes to taking the necessary action to deliver on them. And without that, all this self-congratulatory backslapping is little more than greenwashing.

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A report by our own Environmental Protection Agency this month said that, looking out to 2040, the State would find it difficult to meet its carbon budgets due to a “significant gap” between those targets and the projected emissions. The agriculture and transport sectors — which also include some of Ireland’s largest companies — were offered as two areas where the gap between ambition and reality is widest.

Urgent implementation of “all climate plans and policies, plus further new measures” will be needed if the Republic is to meet a legally-binding 51 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030, according to the agency.

The first step to effective action against climate change is to stop kidding ourselves that we’re all doing a good job in addressing the issue right now. The second and even more difficult step will be to accept that addressing carbon emissions will mean difficult choices — and higher costs — for all of us.

The time has come to stop writing reports about our success in setting targets and focus instead on reports on how our actions measure up against those targets, why they have fallen short, and the real actions they will take to make up lost ground.