IRELAND WILL fail to meet stringent EU targets for a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 unless policy-makers start to "think more creatively", according to the director general of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Speaking on the publication of a report by the agency outlining the scale of the challenge, Dr Mary Kelly said it was clear additional measures would be needed to cut emissions, particularly in the agriculture and transport sectors.
"The more we project this forward, the starker it becomes. But we have to deal with it," she said, adding that the agency intended to publish forecasts of Ireland's "distance to target" every year to monitor the effect of new policies and measures.
"Publication of national greenhouse gas projections is an important step in understanding Ireland's greenhouse gas profile in the medium term, and in assessing the effectiveness of policy measures designed to reduce emissions.
"The projections, published today, show that meeting the proposed targets over the years to 2020 will be extremely challenging and further emphasises that actions to reduce domestic emissions must be intensified and strengthened."
The challenge would be even more onerous if the EU agrees to cut emissions by 30 per cent, on foot of an international agreement at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, assuming that it produces a deal.
Dr Kelly said it was evident from the agency's projections that Ireland would have to take more measures to comply with the limited goals set under the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force on January 1st last, probably by purchasing more credits abroad.
"Using the most ambitious reduction scenario under current policies and measures, we will be on average 5 million tonnes per annum higher," she said. "That's 1.4 million tonnes worse than last year's National Climate Change Strategy projected."
She said the longer-term targets would be much more challenging for Ireland to meet because the EU wants a separate accounting regime for energy and industry in its Emissions Trading System (ETS) and sectors of the economy not covered by it. "We have a unique situation in Ireland because agriculture accounts for 27 per cent of our total emissions, or 40 per cent of non-ETS emissions. That's twice as big as France, a major agricultural producer - and reductions in this area are difficult to achieve."
The spotlight will then be on transport, where a major switch will be needed from car-based commuting to public transport and on housing, where significant investment will be required to "retro-fit" existing homes to make them much more energy-efficient.
"Fossil fuel dependency is a huge issue for us. We have to find some way of moving out of that," Dr Kelly said. "We have to be able to think creatively into the electric car era. Our imagination has to be big enough to say will we be driving electric cars in 20 years' time." Even if all policies and measures to reduce emissions were implemented in full and on time, the report forecasts Ireland would overshoot the EU's 20 per cent reduction target for 2020 by at least 7 million tonnes per annum.
More widespread afforestation would reduce Ireland's overshoot of the 2020 target from 7 million to 2.3 million tonnes, according to agency programme manager Ken Macken. But he said we would "need to pull together a cosmopolitan list of policies" to cut emissions.Projections of Ireland's emissions to 2020 are available on the agency's website, www.epa.ie