Written answers
Thursday, 8 May 2025
Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Ciarán Ahern (Dublin South West, Labour)
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67. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport the corrective actions he will take to ensure that the transport sector meets its emissions reductions targets by 2030 and does not exceed the sectoral emissions ceilings; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [18068/25]
Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal East, Fianna Fail)
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Transport is a very difficult sector to decarbonise and the development of the Climate Action Plan 2023 developed policies intended to put the sector on a pathway to achieve an emissions reduction of 50% by 2030, in a manner that is compliant with the sectoral emission ceilings for carbon budget periods. However, achieving the carbon budget 1 target of 54 Mt CO2eq will be extremely challenging and with that in mind, my Department is working closely with the National Transport Authority (NTA) to deliver the CAP26 corrective action modelling project, the aims of which are threefold:
1. Correct the trajectory of carbon emissions from the transport sector out to 2030.
2. Identify whether any additional measures, above and beyond those required to keep the transport sector within its sectoral emissions ceilings, could be proposed to deliver currently unallocated savings for carbon budget period 2, including further modal shifts and deploying sustainable biofuels, in hard-to-abate transport sectors, such as domestic aviation, maritime and freight.
3. Identify decarbonisation interventions and policy pathways that will continue to deliver sustained and accelerated emissions abatement beyond 2030 into Carbon Budget 3.
The detailed scope of this project has been agreed between my Department and the NTA, and work is underway to complete this work in time for a re-assessed and strengthened policy pathway to be set out in CAP26.
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