Malcolm Noonan (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I congratulate him on his appointment to the Custom House. There is a great team over there. I wish him all the best in his tenure. I join in the sympathies with the family of Kacper Dudek, who lost his life during the terrible storm.

People, communities and businesses affected by Storm Éowyn are looking to us, as policymakers, to assess how we can help them and be better prepared for future events. That is something we all want to achieve. Now that many global leaders have effectively given up the ghost as regards meeting binding climate targets and have turned their attention to magicking up solutions such as carbon capture and storage, we must move swiftly on to adaptation and try to embed resilience community by community, home by home and town by town. The EPA anticipates that, in a scenario of just over 1°C warming, Ireland will see an increased incidence of heavy rainfall events, with overall significant reductions in average annual levels of spring and summer rainfall and rising sea levels. Some modelling puts us on a trajectory towards 2.5°C. Heat stress accounts for the highest number of fatalities in Europe by far. The past decade has broken all records, breaching the 1.5°C average increase in temperature that we are told is our only chance of avoiding chaos.

Ireland's adaptation framework must now be reviewed in light of Storm Éowyn. The plan assigns three levels of responsibility towards adaptation to the effects of a warming planet. Local plans should afford priority to local knowledge and experience. Regional plans look to the cross-boundary nature of extreme weather events, whether flooding, prolonged drought, fire or wind. Nationally, the Irish Government has an important role to play at EU level in working with other member states to embed resilience across the Continent, share services where feasible and learn from all of these events. Taking into account the national adaptation framework and the development of local authority climate action plans under the NAF, all 31 local authorities prepare local adaptation strategies. Local authority CAP guidelines have been developed by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications in collaboration with key players in the local government and climate sectors. These are overseen by the project advisory group, which sets out how local authority CAPs should be prepared. This includes specific guidance on climate adaptation. Each local authority CAP is required to include a climate change risk assessment for the administrative area of the local authority. A technical annex provides guidance on how to undertake a climate change risk assessment. This has been developed on the basis of the existing local authority adaptation strategy guidelines along with adaptation to climate change guidelines on vulnerability impacts and risk assessment. The framework is also clear about collaboration with other local authorities, and it states that local authorities should collaborate with other relevant public bodies, such as the climate action regional offices, CAROs, the EPA, Met Éireann, the SEAI, Government and other agencies in co-ordinating climate adaptation efforts at regional and national levels. It is important that local experience and knowledge are part of any review and that is something I think we all agree on, not just from Storm Éowyn, but from other weather events. In all of these cases there has been an inconsistent level of preparedness and sometimes poor collaboration and sharing of resources. These all contributed to negative outcomes for communities. We must work with nature. We have an opportunity through the upcoming national nature restoration plan and the resources of the climate and nature fund to restore free-flowing rivers, to increase riparian planting and to use nature-based solutions to help alleviate flooding events in urban and rural areas. We heard calls to address flooding through dredging. That is not really the right approach, and in any event would be constrained by the EU habitats regulations. However, there are nature-based solutions that can work on a catchment level, but we need to begin acting urgently. Calls for a derogation in the hedge cutting season are equally unhelpful in the debate. Road safety is already catered for under the Wildlife Act, and there needs to be a funded plan for pruning and reduction of roadside trees. Trees provide valuable ecosystem services in our countryside.

Storm Éowyn destroyed tens of thousands of acres of both private and State forestry and there is a perfect storm of a crisis in the sector now. While thoughts immediately turn to supports for growers and I welcome the establishment of the windblow task force, there is a glut of approximately two years of lumber lying flattened like matchsticks. It needs to be harvested and taken to sawmills for processing. Local power generation and battery storage should be planned for to mitigate against a risk of prolonged power outages. How will the insurance industry respond to the increasing frequency and ferocity of weather-related events?

Storm Éowyn has exposed a vulnerability in terms of our preparedness for what will be a volatile future. In many ways that future is here, and we should have learned from the shortcomings and from the communities and local people to ramp up investment in risk reduction, resilience and future-proofing infrastructure to protect lives and livelihoods.

In the context of the debate on the future of our Defence Forces, I welcome plans to increase investment in both equipment, capabilities and personnel wages and conditions. I believe Óglaigh na hÉireann should be included in future adaptation plans as having a key role under its mandated remit of aid to the civil authority. If the State is going to invest in equipment, vehicles, helicopters and other fleet, we must ensure it has dual-purpose capability. Such equipment could be deployed rapidly in cases of flooding, fires, snow events or other natural disasters. This must be about collaboratively building and embedding a culture of natural resilience into the system. Nílimid ann fós. Go deimhin, tá bealach fada le dul againn, but we have much to be grateful for and hopeful about. We have something that many other countries do not have. We still have strong community bonds. which have helped so many vulnerable people. We are also grateful to emergency services, local authorities, ESB crews and colleagues who joined from across Europe. Let us take all of these good outcomes to help shape a funded national resilience plan that will give us confidence in uncertain times.