Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Climate Action Plan 2021, which was published in November 2021, set out a detailed roadmap for meeting our climate ambition under the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 and included indicative ranges of emission reductions for each sector of the economy. The update for this year will follow on from the ambition set out in that and will reflect a strengthened climate governance framework.

Recent EPA reports have indicated that, as we have emerged from Covid-19, our national emissions have begun to increase again, by 4.7% last year, as some sectors have recovered. This has followed an overall decrease of 3.6% in 2020. The increase in total emissions in the past year has been driven by the use of coal and oil for electricity generation, as we have just discussed, as well as increases in both the agriculture and transport sectors. The recently approved sectoral emissions ceilings set out a framework for meeting our carbon budgets and our commitment to the 50% reduction in emissions by 2030. These will be reflected in the climate action plan due to be published next week.

Examples of where there have been reductions and where measures have actually been delivering in the past year are where we connected 700 MW of renewable power so far this year. That is a record year and we have never connected as much. What is really interesting is we are starting to see new sources such as solar power, which have been delivered through this auction process. That renewables capacity is critical to meeting our climate reduction targets.

A second example would be peatland restoration. To date, 10,511 ha have been rehabilitated across 35 bogs. That has delivered an emissions reduction of 68,000 tonnes of CO2 and will continue to do so each and every year because that is a permanent reduction process. That is 10,500 ha out of the 33,000 ha we have committed to do. As the Deputy would know, there are also great benefits in biodiversity as well as carbon benefits, together with benefit in just transition where some of the same people who have been employed and have skills in extracting turf have now been redeployed with other skills.

A third example would be the national retrofit plan, which was published last year. We are on target to what we said this year. A total of 27,000 houses have been upgraded with an estimated 33,000 tonnes in carbon savings, together with 131 GW hours in energy savings. Real change is happening and we are on track to do what we said we would do in retrofitting and renewables and in the rehabilitation of bogland. We need to do far more and to multiply the delivery but we are delivering.

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