Ms Niamh Garvey:

We would really like to thank the committee for the invitation to contribute to today's session on progress in the implementation of the national mitigation plan. In our contribution, we will look at the global context of climate impacts and climate action in which the national mitigation plan is set. We will then conclude with a few concrete recommendations to the committee. I will be handing over to Ms Cliona Sharkey for those recommendations.

Globally, climate impacts are already at crisis levels. In Ireland, Europe and elsewhere in the rich world we are becoming increasingly aware of our vulnerability to extreme and erratic weather. Poor countries, however, which have contributed least to the problem and have the least capacity to cope, are being hit first and hardest. In countries where agriculture is the major source of food and income for people living in poverty, the situation is devastating. Today in Ethiopia alone, almost 8 million people are in need of food aid as a result of persistently poor rains compounding the drought of 2016 and 2017. That is more than the entire population of the island of Ireland.

Drought is not a new phenomenon in east Africa, but we are seeing drought spread to areas that were not affected in the past, and we are seeing the gap between droughts decreasing, with long-term development work needing to give way to cyclical humanitarian response. Families are unable to recover before the next drought hits, resulting in a downward spiral of poverty, hunger and vulnerability. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, given the stock of carbon now in the atmosphere and current emission pathways, the impacts are set to manifest increasingly over the next decade and increase thereafter. Trócaire and other organisations will continue to support communities to increase their resilience to climate shocks and to provide humanitarian relief each time it is needed. However, there is a limit to what efforts of this kind can do. Delivery on the commitments made in the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and holding it well below 2 °C at most is absolutely essential if we are to avoid further climate impacts to which these communities, and indeed our own societies, cannot adapt.

In this context, it is critical to ask whether the national mitigation plan, NMP, pursuing a transition in line with the temperature limits Ireland signed up to as part of the Paris Agreement. The answer is "No". Regrettably, while we can debate the details of the NMP and its implementation, unless we acknowledge and address this fundamental issue, we are undermining the hard-won progress of the Paris Agreement and we are tacitly accepting the significant additional impacts associated with rise of 2o Celsius or more and all of the human, environmental, economic and political risks that this will entail globally and for our own society.

Importantly, moreover, it is also clear that since the adoption of the Paris Agreement that the EU's collective emission reduction ambition, like that of all individual countries, will need to increase if it is to be brought into line with the temperature limits set out in the agreement. The pathway that is implicitly set out for Ireland in the NMP is one of minimal reductions over the next decade, followed by an increase in reductions in the period coming after 2030. In their in-depth report on global emissions UN scientists, who are part of the UN environmental programme, are warning us that unless we increase action and ambition in the short term, delivery of the temperature limits set out in the Paris Agreement will become virtually impossible.