At a Time of Climate Crisis: Delaying climate action could make carbon budgets infeasible

At a Time of Climate Crisis: Greenhouse gas emissions need to suffer a death by 1,000 cuts to keep legal commitments

MaREI researcher Dr Hannah Daly at ERI, University College Cork has written an article for her column ‘At a Time of Climate Crisis’ in the Irish Times entitled ‘Delaying climate action could make carbon budgets infeasible’. 

Making up for delayed emissions cuts after 2030 may become impossible, unless climate action is quickly ramped up.

The Government’s latest climate action plan includes wide-ranging and ambitious measures aimed at reducing Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent set of emissions projections reveals a significant gap between these measures and the pathway necessary to meet our global commitments on climate change.

Even if the proposed measures are fully implemented, Ireland will only achieve a 29 per cent cut in annual emissions by 2030, the projections state. This falls well short of what is required, leading to an overshoot of our first and second legally-binding carbon budgets for this decade by 117 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Read the full article here.