Dr. Cara Augustenborg:

I thank members for coming today. I am just going to finish with a few slides on what Ireland's response is and needs to be as a result of the Paris agreement. To set this in an international context, this week the World Economic Forum wrote a report on global risks. It gathered more than 700 experts and identified failure to adapt and mitigate for climate change as one of the top three greatest potential threats to society. Some more specific impacts that are related to climate change, such as impacts on water resources, migration and severe weather, were also identified as significant threats to society at the moment.

Ireland's response to the EU regarding doing its fair share in dealing with greenhouse gas emissions reduction to date has generally been to argue that we are a special case. One could say that every country has its special cases. For example, Poland produces lots of coal and could also argue for a special case. If we do that, none of us will achieve the targets set out in the Paris agreement. We argue that Ireland should now be saying what we can do and what we are doing to meet that agreement, particularly since we are now accepting money from the EU to address flooding, which is related to climate change. In a national context, we did achieve our Kyoto Agreement targets, primarily due to the recession, but we have not had a climate strategy since 2012.

It is now well overdue. We are at the bottom of the pack in our response to meeting our 2020 commitments. The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has said that without serious policy implementation we will continue to struggle to meet our emission targets. There are fines for non-compliance, so in addition to not doing our fair share, we face severe penalties for not doing it.

The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 was passed in December and this set us on a trajectory to begin finally to make some action plans. One of the powerful tools within the Act is the formation of a national advisory committee which was modelled on the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. This committee could allow us to ensure any climate action plans we propose do in fact meet the Paris agreement. The advisory committee was formed officially yesterday. Our concern is that periodic reviews from that advisory council are only set to take place every 18 months. We are expecting a national climate plan early in 2016 and we believe the advisory committee needs to advise the Government before a draft climate plan is put forward. We urge the joint committee members to consider requesting a periodic review from the advisory committee now that it is officially formed. Otherwise that advisory committee is essentially producing submissions after a draft is released and does not have as much power as it should exercise.

All Government policy, such as policy on transport and agriculture, and county development plans now needs to be reviewed in light of the fact that we are a party to the very ambitious goals of the Paris agreement. We also need to ensure our mitigation plans, once the climate adaptation plan is officially approved, are not left on the long finger. We need to begin immediately to meet this ambitious goal.

The energy sector is probably the most ambitious sector from which we could get the fastest wins in terms of reducing emissions. A White Paper was published in December which sets out a good vision for decarbonising our energy sector, ideally by 2050. The action that would yield the fastest results is to look at retrofitting our homes and our building stock to make them more energy efficient. There is nothing to stop us saying that our energy standards will rise from the average of D1 to B1 by 2030. Community ownership and co-ownership is key to the success of any strategies to reducing emissions and energy consumption. We need a community energy strategy to bring on board community ownership. We also desperately need a price for solar energy. At present there is no pathway for communities, schools, farmers to sell solar energy to the national electricity grid. Without that we cannot use alternative renewable energy such as solar energy in decarbonising the national grid. We need to phase out fossil fuel use immediately. This includes stopping the burning of coal at Moneypoint, and ceasing the subsidy on peat burning stations. We have to stop the exploration for oil. We also have to ban fracking. To comply with the Paris agreement we simply cannot do these things any more.

This joint committee has a mandate to look at policy coherence and how our national policies match up with our goals in terms of overseas development. I know Irish Aid is supposed to provide a report which this committee is supposed to review. Climate change is one of the issues on which we need to ensure what we do nationally is coherent with what we do internationally. One example of a risk to that is in the bioenergy sector. We simply do not have enough land to produce the amount of biomass to meet bioenergy targets and therefore there is a risk that we will import biomass such as palm oil from other countries to meet the obligation. Importing that kind of biomass has significant ecological impacts, such as deforestation, on other countries and it also threatens food security for those countries by taking land that is available for agriculture from those countries. This committee needs to consider how our policies around climate action match up with our Irish Aid objectives.

Mr. Mac Evilly addressed the climate finance issue from a global perspective, but members may be aware that Ireland has only contributed €2 million this year to the green climate fund as part of the Paris agreement. When one views that contribution in terms of a per capitafigure, it is equivalent to about 57 cent per capitafrom Ireland compared with the average of €12per capita. What we are offering is internationally embarrassing. We need to offer a figure in the range of €20 million to match the contribution of a country of our size, when one considers that Ireland produces some of the highest greenhouse gas emissions per capitain Europe and the world. We desperately need to increase our contribution to the green climate fund. We were told that a policy document on this would be brought to Cabinet in December and those of us who were in Paris and met the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Alan Kelly, were also told that, as soon as he returned from Paris, he would be making an announcement on increasing our contribution to the green climate fund. Neither of those things has happened. This contribution is well overdue and we are at risk of international embarrassment if we do not address it soon.