Dan Neville (Limerick, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak about this Bill. The Government promised in its programme for Government to publish legislation on climate change with a view to its enactment before the end of the life of the Dáil. This Bill partly fulfils that commitment.

Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity. It threatens the environment and economic development and the quality of life we enjoy. This generation will be remembered by how it responded to this challenge.

Climate change is real. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, published an assessment report in 2013 which left no doubt about the precise nature of this challenge. It concluded that the evidence of climate change was unequivocal. It also shows how man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are driving climate change. Failure to take the necessary action on climate change will have potentially catastrophic effects in many areas of the globe. Climate change will also have spill-over impacts in all regions and countries which will grow as its impact increases. We will have to adapt our lives to mange our responses to these changes and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to ensure future generations can retain the capacity to manage future climatic conditions.

When discussing climate change, it is important to provide a definition of climate. Although weather and climate appear closely related, they are in fact two different concepts. Weather describes the meteorological conditions at a given time and place. Climate, however, describes the meteorological conditions, including temperature, rain and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region over a period, with the typical unit of time taken being 30 years. It is possible, by collecting weather information all around the country every hour and by analysing these records over the aforementioned 30-year period, to assess how the climate is behaving and changing. Currently, Ireland's climate tends to be warm in the summer, at approximately 16° Celsius and cool in the winter at approximately 5° Celsius. Natural climate variability also is picked up by these measurements. For instance, March 2012 was one of the warmest for 50 years, while March 2013 was the coldest on record. This does not mean necessarily that the climate is changing but an increase in extremes such as these is a good indicator that it might be.

One can forecast the likely weather by monitoring the climate and this is important for many reasons. For example, in agriculture, one needs to know when one should sow crops and so on, while planners and engineers need to have climate data in order that they can design roads, buildings and bridges in anticipation of the climate conditions. Climate change is a significant change in the climate a region experiences. It can be caused by natural factors such as variations in solar intensity or volcanic eruptions. However, the term "climate change" is now generally associated with changes in the climate due to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of human activities. Greenhouse gas build-up is caused by excess emissions from activities such as burning fossil fuels for energy, transport, heating and cement manufacture, as well as methane emissions. Greenhouse gases let sunlight pass through the atmosphere to reach the earth but then trap the outgoing energy from the heated surface of the earth like a blanket. This causes a warming of the global atmosphere generally although it is hard to anticipate exactly how this will affect climates at more regional scales.

According to the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, warming of the climate system is unequivocal. Many of the observed changes since the 1950s are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea levels have risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. In fact, each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The assessment report also considers that human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, observed warming and understanding of the climate system. Ireland's climate, even in the last 20 years or so, has seen a noticeable change in temperature. A graph from the Met Éireann report, Ireland's Climate: The Road Ahead, shows that Ireland's mean temperature has risen by 0.5° Celsius since 1990 alone, which in climate terms is a highly significant rise. One consequence thus far has been higher rainfall recorded in the west, south west and north of the country. Six of Ireland's warmest years on record have occurred since 1990. In Valentia during 2007, the warmest year since records began in 1892 was recorded. Over the past three decades, an increase in temperature of 0.42° Celsius per decade has been detected, compared with an increase of 0.23° Celsius per decade between 1910 and 1949. If climate change continues at this pace, increased global temperatures will have a dangerous and irreversible impacts on our planet. The challenge for us all, in Ireland and elsewhere, is therefore to limit and adapt to climate change.

In its Programme for Government 2011-2016, the Government agreed to "publish a Climate Change Bill which will provide certainty surrounding government policy and provide a clear pathway for emissions reductions, in line with negotiated EU 2020 targets". In November 2013, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht launched its report on the outline heads of a climate action and low-carbon development Bill, in which it set out a number of possible courses of action that might be considered in future deliberations on the Bill. In April 2014, the Government approved the general scheme of the climate action and low-carbon development Bill. The general scheme of the Bill was developed, following public consultation processes in 2012 by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government and pre-legislative scrutiny by the joint committee. In the latter regard, the joint committee's report is stated to have been given "full consideration and a number of changes were made to reflect its findings, including reducing the interval between proposed national low-carbon roadmaps from seven to five years and enabling the national expert advisory body on climate change to publish directly its annual and periodic review reports".

The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill 2015 was published by the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government on 19 January 2015. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has completed a public consultation process in which it invited written submissions from interested parties on a discussion document on the potential for greenhouse gas mitigation within the agriculture and forestry sector. I welcome the Bill and welcome the opportunity to have contributed to the debate.

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