Dr. Jeanne Moore:

I thank the Deputy for his question. It is very important to think about the social implications. A just transition approach means embracing change. I was listening in to yesterday's discussion. It is fascinating to get a sense of the scale of change and transformation and how we begin to engage with that on a wider societal basis and have those conversations. My personal view is that we are only at the beginning of that.

There are gaps in our understanding and plenty of interesting research projects such as the Dingle project Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir spoke about, which is monitoring the kinds of interventions that can take place when one brings together the ESB, University College Cork, UCC, local farmers and so on. There are some very interesting and innovative projects under way. We need to be more systematic in how we research and develop understandings of what works. There is a considerable amount of engagement outlined in the climate action plan that is being planned on climate dialogue. That, too, is very welcome because having those kind of conversations is at the heart of a just transition. As I said, we are just at the beginning of that.

The work we have commissioned from Professor Niamh Moore-Cherry and her colleagues in UCD will be very useful because it takes a number of different case studies in particular communities and uses a just transition and place-based approach to try to explore with those communities what the main issues and opportunities they see with climate action are. The results of that work, which will be published in the next few months, will be very valuable in giving an insight into how that can be used for policy and can frame rural development as well as climate action policy.

There are a number of initiatives taking place. I will mention also the work I have just finished on the shared island initiative where we looked at climate biodiversity from a shared island perspective. We did an enormous amount of consultation on that. One of the key themes that came out of that was the need for an integrated climate and biodiversity approach. There was a tremendously positive appetite for communities to very much engage and think about how that vision could be delivered on an all-island basis. There are many things out there that may need to be brought together and more systematically understood and researched.