Mr. Jim Clarken:

I thank the committee for inviting us here and for showing the level of interest it has done on this issue and on our wider development agenda perspective. We are very fortunate that we have such a body that has robustly engaged on a wide range of developmental issues over recent years. Climate change is paramount to success in this area. We will talk initially about climate impacts and what climate justice means. We will give some background on the negotiations and how we have reached this important point before the Paris meeting, which will happen in a couple of weeks. We will focus specifically on climate finance and what the EU and Ireland should do.

Although some members might be more than acutely aware of it, I will reinforce the point for those in any doubt that climate change is real and is happening today, not in the distant future. It has been happening for a number of years and is having a very devastating impact. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, was an unprecedented scientific collaboration and it is now a consensus view of the world's scientific community, approved by the world's governments. It is a landmark way of working on climate issues. The evidence of where the climate has moved to and where it is headed is indisputable. It is important to note this, given that occasionally there are suggestions that the conclusions could be discredited or doubted. It is very clear where climate is heading. It is also clear, based on the scientific evidence, that if the increase reaches 2° Celsius, it will be a tipping point from which it will be very difficult to return, and we will have a potential spiral of other events which we will be unable to control.

The committee and Ireland have shown great leadership in development support and assistance over many years. Mr. Coghlan and I were in New York at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, SDG, summit, where we were very proud to see the leadership Ireland had shown, particularly the team led by Ireland's ambassador to the UN, David Donoghue, in the negotiations to get the extraordinary agreement over the line and in such a business-like fashion that embraced a huge consultation process. More than 1 million people across the globe participated and had their voices included. We have 17 challenging but achievable goals to which the world's governments, including ours, have signed up. It is a tremendous credit and the fact Ireland was in a position to co-chair it and lead it to this important conclusion reflects the long-standing credit and reputation Ireland has had in this space for many years.

I have started with this because this tremendous leadership, despite dark times in our country, is contradicted by our approach to the environment and climate. The important message I want to communicate is that one cannot be committed to one but not the other. If one believes in the importance of our international potential to make change happen and reverse extreme poverty, which we as a people and this body do, we must also firmly believe in what we can do in terms of the environment and climate change.

During the past 15 years leading up to the SDGs, we worked through the millennium development goals and halved global poverty and dramatically reduced hunger. However, climate change very much threatens the future and the development successes we have had. We are on the cusp, during the next 15 years, of ending extreme poverty and hunger forever. It has been shown that it is possible and can be done. However it will not happen unless we robustly challenge and tackle the climate change reality. Some of the figures are staggering. By 2050, up to 50 million more, rather than fewer, people will be put into hunger.

Rain-fed crop production could fall by up to 50% in some African countries by 2020, that is, in the relative short term. The WHO estimates that climate change has already been responsible for 150,000 deaths and that will increase to a quarter of a million per year from 2030 to 2050. A 2° increase in temperature could lead to a 30% reduction in water in rivers in southern Africa and South America. Sometimes it is hard to move beyond these statistics. I travelled with Tony Connelly from RTE a couple of years ago to make a documentary on the impacts in Malawi. In the programme, we talked to real farmers whom we met. Prior to that, we travelled with Mary Robinson to parts of Kenya and spoke to ordinary farmers about their lifetime experience and what they had seen. The change in rainfall means that huge areas of land are no longer arable at all. Unpredictable rain has an impact on societies that have always known exactly when to plant, when they should harvest and what kind of crops they would have. The yields would go up and down every year but they would be fairly predictable within a range and that has completely changed. It is having a drastic impact on families, on the lives of people and on the hunger trajectory.

To discuss it in the geopolitical space, it is estimated that a million farmers in Syria have left the land in the past ten or 20 years. Who knows how that may or may not have contributed to what is happening in that country. That level of uncertainty has not been helpful. let us put it like that. Into the future, more and more conflicts and issues will arise because of the impact of climate change. Large cities in coastal areas are likely to disappear and hundreds of millions of people will have to flee. The impact on migration and those types of crises will be dramatic. It seems we have not taken this as seriously as we take other issues, and we have to change that mindset and trajectory.

To give a sense of the justice element, my presentation shows that the northern, so-called developed countries are responsible for creating climate change, yet the developing countries are the most impacted by it. The entire continent of Africa produces about 2% of the world's carbon, yet people there are suffering as a result of what we have done in the past 150 years in terms of the Industrial Revolution and so on.

With regard to vulnerabilities, I have produced a chart showing the issues that those of us who work in the development and humanitarian space deal with all the time - natural disasters, poor governance, water insecurity, livelihoods, hunger and conflict. That is in the normal run of things. When one adds the impact of climate change to that, one sees those kinds of vulnerabilities are increased dramatically, namely, increased droughts, flooding, erratic rainfall, temperature rises, increases in vector borne diseases, land loss and displacement. Many of these things can lead to greater conflict and can make the governance situation even worse. It can dramatically increase the number of natural disasters. The past ten years have been some of the hottest on record. There has been a huge impact on crops in places like Australia, Russia, the US and developing countries. The impact of that in this part of the world is that prices increase and change. In other parts of the world it means that people starve. There is widespread hunger which leads to widespread conflict which leads to many other issues with which we will also have to grapple. This leads to humanitarian crises where there is extreme food insecurity and conflict can result from these issues.

I will give an example of one family that has a farm that has been completely decimated by drought. This is something we are seeing increasingly. We have first-hand examples of how that is happening dramatically in many places. From a development perspective, we have made great strides and we cannot allow them to be reversed. This will require a concerted effort. We will present to the committee what we believe Ireland's position should be leading into these talks. If we are to be honest, we are not there yet. We are concerned that there has been a slightly schizophrenic way of thinking by Government so far on the approach to development, hunger and those issues we care about when it comes to the climate part of the story.

As this progresses, none of us will be immune. I will show another picture that was taken in Ireland. It was not taken in Bangladesh. Up to €2 billion a year is lost by small farmers in Ireland. There have been lengthier rainfall events in winter, more intense downpours in summer, increased droughts in summer and health risks to farm animals, which will have a tremendous impact on our important agricultural sector. We will talk more about that later, but agriculture is a concern in terms of the impact and the cause.

We are a coalition of development and environmental organisations working closely together because we care about the same issues. The message from the development side of this coalition is that a sense of justice is required. If we believe in a just world - and we do - we have to be responsible and deliver on that responsibility, particularly to those who have had nothing to do with creating this huge problem we face.

I have another small chart showing the per capitaCO₂emissions. Per capita, Ireland's emissions are a hundred times those of Uganda and multiple times those of everyone else. We have one of the largest in the world, so we have much more to do in this regard. The message from the development space is very much that this is a justice, fairness and responsibility issue. We have managed to support others to lead themselves out of poverty. It is also about ensuring we do not erode the good work we have done. We have worked too hard for that. People here have been committed and farmers, rural communities and people in developing countries have struggled to deliver what we have got so far. We cannot allow ourselves to go backward. We have to move forward. If we are going to deliver on the sustainable development goals, we have to deliver on our climate commitments.

I will now hand over to Mr. Mac Evilly who will take the committee through the next phase.