Professor John Sweeney:

I thank the committee for inviting me to appear before it. I recall being here or hereabouts almost 30 years ago, in 1990, for the first national climate change strategy, which is still the best. Like all the others, it has failed miserably to deliver.

The first point to make is that Ireland is already encountering climate change. Everywhere in the country today is 0.5° Celsius warmer than it was 30 years ago. We are on target for the kinds of changes in climate that the rest of the world is experiencing and will continue to experience. We know from our modelling work that over the next 20 years or so we will warm by a further 0.5° and perhaps even by as much as 1° over the next 30 years. That will not be crucial for Ireland. It will extend our growing season and cause complications for our biodiversity but the real climate change impacts in Ireland will come from rainfall changes and increased winter rainfall in the west of Ireland in particular. There will be decreased summer rainfall in the east, where our people are located and public water supply will become a growing concern.

One of the consequences of change of this nature is that the extremes will change much more quickly and radically than the mean. It is part of the consequence when we examine the distribution of climate variables. In many respects we have seen in Ireland over the past few years some of those extremes beginning to manifest themselves. We cannot label individual extremes confidently yet to climate change but, increasingly, the science is enabling us to assess the contribution made by anthropogenic climate change to them. We know from work done in Maynooth that the winter of 2013 to 2014 was the stormiest winter both in Ireland and the UK for at least the past 143 years. That is an extreme event. We know the winter of 2015 to 2016 was the wettest winter on record over large parts or even much of Ireland.

We saw extremes more recently in Donegal in August, where it had approximately half the amount of rain that Dublin had in the entire winter of December, January and February in six hours. More recently, we saw floods in Mountmellick and members are aware of the more recent floods in Galway. All of those are extreme events. The once in a century event is, to some extent, a concept that has really passed its sell-by date.

The Paris obligations have been mentioned and the key phrase as far as I am concerned is that countries must act with common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, with developed countries taking the lead. The responsibility for doing most comes to those countries that are better off than other countries and which have historically contributed most to the problem. We know the pathway means the world will have to decarbonise by 50% within the next 20 years, which is quite a tall order. It means there is no time and space for promises or what we might do; there must be urgency in doing what we can now.

There are a number of studies indicating where we should be going. The Stockholm climate equity calculator demonstrates that in the middle of the 2020s we will have crossed the line of equity and be in debt to the developing world with our large amounts of carbon emissions. We are therefore part of the problem rather than the solution. There is a certain revisionism going on with respect to the 2020 obligations, which were accepted by all parties. Members can see in the documentation the extent to which they were endorsed by all parties at the time they were made. Ireland, as we now know, is a laggard, as the Taoiseach said last month. It is the worst performing country in Europe when it comes to climate performance. The national policy position is over and above the climate change Act. In Ireland and without any pressure, we have already endorsed where we should be going. There should be an aggregate reduction of at least 80% compared with 1990 levels across the three key sectors.

We must change the culture of negotiation away from the pattern of returning from Brussels and getting a pat on the back for having got every concession and flexibility possible. We see this very clearly in some of the examples I have given. The 2030 example is best of all, as I have listed a variety of ways in which the Commission's proposals were watered down not solely by Ireland, but by countries, in some cases with Ireland supporting them. It is important we tackle that problem.