Ms Mary Donnelly:

I am glad to join the committee to discuss the importance of climate change mitigation in the transport sector. I appreciate that I can do this virtually because that saves quite a few emissions in transport from Kinsale up to Dublin for the meeting.

The committee has my written submission. I will make a slightly shorter oral statement in order to save time. Last year, the Oireachtas legislated for two carbon budgets up to 2030. The Government subsequently set out a series of sectoral ceilings within those budgets including one for transport. While this is very positive, the council nonetheless underlines the absence of a sectoral ceiling for land use, land-use change and forestry, LULUCF, and notes that we still have a gap in the second carbon budget to our target.

The transport sector in Ireland is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The ceilings that have been set called for a 50% reductions in emissions from the 2018 number by 2030. The council has noted that this is an ambitious target and sectoral ceiling and will require early and fundamental change in the Irish transport system. However, from a positive perspective almost all the measures to reduce transport emissions have potentially positive impacts such as improving air quality, reducing noise, improving the well-being and health outcomes of the population while also protecting households from volatile fossil-fuel crises. It is not just for climate that we propose these measures. They have co-benefits across a whole range of aspects of our society.

For the sectoral ceiling, we started with the number for 2018, which was 12.2. Our target for 2030 is six. I am using the shortened version of the numbers because it gets very complicated otherwise. That that means that the 12.2 figure must come down each year somewhat in the first carbon budget and quite significantly in the second. Transport has got a benefit in terms of emissions as a result of the Covid restrictions that we all went through both in 2019 and 2020 with some follow-through also in 2021. As a consequence, our emissions in the transport sector in 2021 fell to 10.9. That was very positive from an emissions perspective. However, while we do not have the final figures for 2022, we can already see that the emissions for 2022 are rebounding and are increasing. The council is concerned that if this rebound and continual increase of emissions continues as it is in the first carbon budget will mean that we will not be able to stay within the first carbon budget for transport and that will have consequences for the second carbon budget.

To endeavour to stay within our carbon budget the council made a number of recommendations in its annual review last year. I will list a few. These included the reduction in public transport fares and cost-of-living measures that were introduced in respect of the transport sector. The council considered these were positive and also just and fair across society and recommended that they would be continued. We are pleased that they were continued in budget 2023. We also called for the electrification of public transport because as we move forward, public transport will play a greater role in our transport system and therefore it needs to decarbonise very quickly.

We also recommended that low-cost finance initiatives be extended to include the purchase of electric vehicles, EVs. This might be relevant in rural parts of the country, where public transport will not be able to substitute for a privately owned vehicle. Therefore, we should be supporting people to decarbonise their transport through these new technologies and facilitating the finance cost for them.

A specific area that the council identified was road space reallocation. I will mention that again later because it came on foot of a very extensive study that we commissioned by the OECD. Road reallocation was one of its key messages for Ireland from the study. In this context, local authorities have a very important role to play. Even though not covered by our carbon budgets at the moment, the council is also concerned about emissions both in the aviation and marine sectors. The council considers that we need to start addressing these because they will be covered progressively, as we go forward, with European legislative developments. In the medium and longer term, our transport emissions will ultimately be influenced by our spatial planning decisions. If we can achieve land-use planning and public transport infrastructures that coincide and facilitate living and living with access to services nearby, whereby people have choices that they can make in terms of accessing those services other than, for example, using a private car, that will facilitate this mitigated action that we need to undertake.

Just for the record, the council commissions research each year. I have already mentioned the OECD report, which was a significant in emphasising the necessity for the reallocation of road space and the move in terms of spatial planning. We have also done an analysis of the subsidies for fossil fuels, particularly in the transport sector. Both of those studies are available on our website. We will be happy to send copies to the committee should it wish us to do so. The council welcomes the updated transport chapter in the Climate Action Plan 2023, and particularly welcomes the focus on the avoid, shift, improve paradigm in establishing policies. It is one that the council has recommended and we welcome that manifesting itself in the climate action plan of 2023. The council acknowledges the significant challenge that exists in reducing emissions in the transport space. It will have an impact on individuals and businesses. It is important that we leave nobody behind in that process, and that we ensure that we have a just transition as we mitigate our emissions in the transport space. As I said at the outset, many of the changes that we need to make are indeed positive in a general sense for society. The challenge that we have and, indeed, the investments that we need to make as we go forward need to be designed to deliver a just transition but also one that delivers benefits to the society as well as delivering on our climate action in the transport space.

We are now in year 3 of the carbon budget. It is a pivotal moment in that cycle in order to ensure that we can stay within the budget and achieve our legislative objectives. It will not be easy, but the council is very pleased to work with the members of the committee and others in terms of achieving the policy and taking the actions that will be necessary to maintain our reduction of emissions in the transport sector going forward over the next number of years.