Upper estimates for the financial cost to Ireland of missing its 2030 climate targets are as high as €26 billion. It’s an eye-watering sum but pales in comparison to the environmental cost of not meeting them.
According to the most recent Planetary Health Check report from the Potsdam Institute in Germany, we have now breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, the guardrails beyond which earth can no longer be designated a safe operating space. The most recent breach is what are now dangerous levels of ocean acidification.
The idea of risking irreversible damage to our very own life support machine knocks financial penalties into a cocked hat.
“The reason we need to meet our climate targets is because we can’t negotiate with the atmosphere,” says Meaghan Carmody, senior sustainability advisor at Business in the Community, a charity that helps businesses develop and achieve their corporate and social responsibility aims.
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Unfortunately, the current environment, which has seen a pushback against climate action internationally, is particularly unsettling for businesses.
“When policy is shifting constantly, businesses don’t have the certainty they need to be able to develop strategies that are long term in nature,” says Carmody.
“It is why those targets are so important. They give that certainty and are aligned with international science, meaning there’s a good chance they will keep us within that safe operating space.”
From an Irish perspective not only are we off track in relation to our targets, we’ve gone backwards, she says, pointing to recent reports from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“When you look at the EPA assessment last year and compare it with our trajectory this year, we have regressed. Last year the assessment was that we were likely to reach a 29 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, on 1990 levels, instead of the required 51 per cent. Now it’s only a 23 per cent reduction.”
Bad enough as it would be to miss our climate targets, it is perhaps even more disheartening to realise that Ireland is one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel investors globally.
Research into the subject from Trócaire, a charity which supports people in the developing world to cope with the consequences of climate change, ranks Ireland as 14th globally in terms of fossil fuel investment by fund manager location.
Ireland is one of the only two jurisdictions – the other is Switzerland – that has such significant fossil fuel investment, without having a fossil fuel industry of its own. Indeed, we’re ahead of fossil fuel producers such as Brazil, Russia and Kuwait. “We were shocked by the findings,” says Siobhán Curran, Trócaire’s head of policy and advocacy.
“Ireland is playing an outsize role and has become a key global centre for investment in fossil fuels.” Continued investment in ever-expanding fossil fuel companies is, she says, “flying in the face of all the science” as they work to produce more oil and coal.
Not alone does this display “complete policy incoherence” in relation to our bid to hit our climate targets, but the fact that the EU is rowing back on its much-vaunted Green Deal doesn’t augur well either.
In February the European Commission’s Omnibus package proposed amendments to dilute the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), designed to require companies to undertake proper due diligence to prevent adverse environmental impacts – and human rights infringements – in their supply chain.
“We are massively concerned about the watering down of the directive,” says Curran. “We see it as an attack on climate and the environment but also essentially a pushback on corporate accountability. If we’re going to address the climate crisis, we need to address the accountability.”
The watering down of the CSDDD has given rise to the kind of mixed messaging that could encourage governments to take their foot off the pedal in relation to climate obligations.
That’s a concern, according to the Irish Coalition for Business and Human Rights (ICBHR), an umbrella group including NGOs, universities and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, among others, which believes that putting people and planet before profit is quite simply the bedrock of a fair economy.
The recent change in tack from the EU represents “a massive U-turn,” says Evie Clarke, ICBHR’s senior policy and advocacy officer, who says it arose on foot of the Commission’s competitiveness agenda, and in particular the Draghi Report, published last year.
But for the EU to change tack in this manner, largely in response to changes taking place in the US, risks being “a race to the bottom”, particularly as it emerges that changes to the CSDDD came about mainly as a result of lobbying by big oil companies, she adds.
Clarke says, “The previous Irish Government took a really strong position in support of the CSDDD – eventually – but the current Irish Government is just sitting back and watching this law, that was introduced to protect people and planet, just go up in flames in front of their eyes.”
