Dr. Orla Kelleher:

I am going to pick up on the question of whether Ireland is doing its fair share. Given my legal background, I am going to talk about this issue in more legal terms. What Ireland is committed to via the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 and the effort sharing regulation, ESR, at EU level still does not align to any sort of fair share contribution to meeting the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement. This point is well documented by many studies.

It was agreed because of political expediency and I think everyone in the meeting knows this. It is not yet a fair share contribution. The idea of a fair share contribution and of making a contribution towards meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement is not just a nice to have goal but a requirement of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 by virtue of the new section 3(3) inserted into the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015. This was a novel requirement inserted into the original legislation that requires the Minister and the Government when carrying out various functions under the Act, including when preparing the long-term strategy, which, as we know, is going to be one document for our EU- and national-level obligations, to do so in a manner that is consistent with Article 2 of the UNFCCC, the idea of preventing dangerous climate change, and the requirement of Article 2 of the Paris Agreement. Importantly, this requirement applies to all of Article 2 and not just to the temperature goal of 1.5°C. We know this temperature is now the de factogoal. In addition to this requirement, however, there are requirements for equity and common but differentiated responsibility.

Effectively, we have created a bridge between the Paris Agreement and domestic climate law and this must be reflected in our long-term strategy. We must understand how the Minister and the Government consider that they have acted consistently in this regard. At present, the current draft does not show in any way to me how this is consistent with us making some kind of fair share contribution. There are different ways in which we could make this contribution. One would be to increase the level of ambition, which we have talked about a little bit already, of our decarbonisation target. How could we do this? One way to approach it would be via the carbon budgeting cycle. We have two upcoming revisions in this regard. We have the finalisation of the third and fourth carbon budgets and there would be an opportunity here to include international aviation and shipping emissions and also to make these budgets properly aligned with and proofed to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement.

Professor Barry McMullin, Mr. Paul Price and Dr. Aideen O'Dochartaigh have been doing brilliant work on identifying a test that is compliant with the Paris Agreement. I definitely recommend that the committee seek advice from them on this issue. We could certainly achieve this goal by shrinking the goal of our carbon budgets and including emissions from international aviation and shipping.

Another way we could make an impact would be by being really transparent about our use of carbon dioxide removal technology and how much of this we intend to rely on, because currently this is not transparent. We could also put concrete limits on this approach because there are feasibility constraints. We know the IPCC has said there are major feasibility constraints to employing negative emissions technologies, including carbon dioxide removal and this type of approach. If we were to be really serious about achieving our goals here, then, we must say that, at a minimum, we are going to be reducing our emissions through actual emissions reductions by X percent. This should absolutely reflect the Paris Agreement.

Ultimately, the other way we can make a fair share contribution is through increasing climate finance. Ireland has been quite good on doing this but we could be a whole lot better. We really need to be scaling up climate finance if we are going to be demonstrating that we are making a fair share contribution. As I said, this is not just a nice-to-have aspiration but an actual requirement of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021.