Ms Meaghan Carmody:

I thank Deputy Bruton for his questions. My colleague, Ms O'Neill, will respond to his question on how the IPCC report relates to the SDGs.

On the Deputy's comment about the potential of the 17 goals to mobilise people, there are other prisms, to use the Deputy's word, but there are no other prisms that have got unanimous buy-in from all UN member states. With respect, it is not up to us to decide necessarily to do away with one and I am not saying that the Deputy referenced that. The goals comprise the only framework that has been agreed by all UN member states. There are others and Ms Bennett referenced well-being frameworks but they have certain drawbacks. In Ireland, for example, it does not take into account the trans-boundary effects of policies in line with target 17.14 on policy coherence for sustainable development so that really needs to be addressed. There is also "donut economics", which I am sure that the Deputy has heard of. They all say approximately the same thing, which is that we need to stop over-shooting ecological boundaries and under-shooting social thresholds. We have seen in recent years what happens when climate action is taken without regard to the social impacts, and how that can hinder progress on climate action and many other policies. So it is this idea of strong sustainability as opposed to weak sustainability. Older diagrams of sustainable development would have a Venn diagram of society, economy and environment. However, more recent Venn diagrams have society and economy embedded within the environment thus acknowledging that it all relies on a stable environment. That is how critical and how crucial it is to work on climate action and the environment but the work needs to be in tandem with other policies. The value of SDGs is that they act as a backstop. If implemented correctly, and using proper policy coherence mechanisms, they can act as a backstop to certain policies having trade-offs in other areas. That is the real benefit of SDGs. We have not yet seen that policy coherence in Ireland and that is one of the blockages.

On the second question on international blockages, data is one that many countries are seeing. We call for our CSO to be resourced financially more so that we can have more regular, timely and relevant disaggregated data on the SDGs to know where we need to focus. I have mentioned the lack of policy coherence. There is also democratic back sliding, which is part and parcel of certain policies not taking into account their differential impacts. Obviously there is climate change and the resulting conflict, conflict separate to climate change and the impacts of Covid. All of those are common issues that prevent SDG progress more globally.