AN ENVIRONMENTAL CHARITY has gotten the green light from the High Court for a judicial review over the government’s failure to produce a long-term climate strategy.
In 2018, the European Union asked Ireland, along with other member states, to develop a 30-year strategy by 2020 outlining how it plans to tackle the climate crisis.
However, three years later, Ireland is one of the only countries still without such a strategy.
High Court Justice Charles Meehan determined this week that he was satisfied proceedings brought by Friends of the Irish Environment contained “arguable grounds”, permitting the group to pursue the legal challenge.
The long-term climate strategies are “crucial”, according to the European Commission, to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, an international climate pact aimed at limiting increases in global temperatures.
Ireland has still not submitted a strategy to the Commission despite multiple promises last year that it would be completed at various points of 2022.
An EU Regulation in 2018 gave member states 13 months to compile their strategies and submit them to the Commission by 1 January 2020.
Ireland is now one of the only EU member states to have not obliged with the regulation, prompting the Commission to open formal infringement proceedings last September over the lack of progress.
At the start of February, the Department of Environment told The Journal that a draft strategy would be brought to Cabinet for approval before being sent to the Commission, with a view to finalising the strategy by the end of the year.
The strategy has not yet been brought to Cabinet but it is understood that it is expected in the next few weeks.
In a statement today, Friends of the Irish Environment said that “long-term strategies provide an overarching vision and direction which guide short-term goals and tactics”.
“They also help to avoid short-sighted decisions that may bring short-term benefits but may harm the targets in the long run.”
The group said it wrote to the Taoiseach and Minister for Climate on the issue in December 2021 and again in April 2022 before sending a “final warning letter” on 5 December 2022.
It then made its application to the court on 20 January 2023. The case is now due back in the High Court on 7 May.
The strategies are one element of the EU’s efforts to meet its requirements under the Paris Agreement to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees and not to allow it to surpass 2 degrees.
Currently, the world is around 1.1 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times and is already experiencing impacts of the climate crisis such as heatwaves, droughts and melting ice sheets.
Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) – a United Nations body that publishes reports written by hundreds of scientists – concluded that countries’ current climate promises will likely not be sufficient to prevent temperatures from warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
However, there is a wide range of feasible and effective measures that are still available for countries to implement to ramp up their efforts, it said in a landmark report.
It stated that human activities have “unequivocally” caused global temperatures to rise, primarily by emitting greenhouse gases, and that it is also “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.
Without sufficient action, the risks and predicted impacts, losses and damages from climate change “escalate” with every increment of global warming, and will interact to create “compound and cascading” risks that are more complex and difficult to manage.
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