A plan to deal with the huge energy demands of data centres must be drawn up, the Government’s climate advisors have said.
They also want a clear end date for petrol and diesel cars and say Ireland will have to face up to the emissions from shipping and aviation not currently counted as part of the national total.
They also say they are concerned at delays in developing plans for green hydrogen and district heating systems.
The issues are raised in a letter to Environment Minister Eamon Ryan who is finalising the country’s ‘Long-term Strategy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions’ .
The strategy sets out how Ireland is to become carbon neutral by 2050 and it was meant to have been submitted to Europe three years ago.
Even with the extra time given to the document, the Climate Change Advisory Council says the draft version currently available remains incomplete.
It does not properly take into account the very large population rise expected in Ireland by 2050 and the additional strain that will place on energy and emissions.
It needs to be much clearer on the kind of country Ireland will need to be to become carbon neutral, with all the implications that has for where and how housing is built, how transport needs will be met and what constraints will be placed on industry.
“The current long term strategy fails to adequately address one of the primary drivers of energy demand in Ireland today, that being data centres”
Legacy issues must also be addressed, the council says, including how to retrofit and decarbonise the 1.1 million homes built before the year 2000 that have poor energy efficiency ratings.
The council says the strategy needs also to decide how to pursue ‘carbon capture and storage’ technologies for industries such as cement which will be very hard to decarbonise.
On agriculture, the council says greater clarity is needed.
“There will inevitably be residual methane and nitrous oxide emissions arising by 2050 and it would be vital to set out a pathway that can balance the latter emissions whilst controlling the former as appropriate,” the letter says.
It stresses the government’s responsibilities on biodiversity and just transition must be wrapped into the approach.
On data centres, the letter states: “The current long term strategy fails to adequately address one of the primary drivers of energy demand in Ireland today, that being data centres.
“Whilst these offer opportunity to Ireland our LTS should reflect in more detail on how this development can be delivered in a sustainable manner that is supportive of our national climate objective, our vision for 2050, and is consistent with the achievement of our sectoral emissions ceilings.”
Council chair, Marie Donnelly, who signed the letter said the council stood ready to support the Government.
She stressed, however: “It is vital that the long term strategy sets out the urgency of accelerated action across all sectors of our economy and society.
“No person, corporate entity, Government Department or Agency should be left in any doubt of the level of priority that should be attached to the achievement of the national climate objective.”
(Source – Irish Independent – Environment – Caroline O Doherty – 26/06/2023)
Sea Level Is Rising – And So Are Concerns About Ireland’s Failure To Prepare For The Impacts
In the holiday hotspot of Mallorca so beloved by Irish sun seekers, authorities are working to protect the tourist- thronged beaches from sea level rise and coastal erosion.
In Venice, the millennium-old basilica in St Mark’s Square has been behind a glass barrier since last winter to stop the encroaching sea from corroding its marble facade.
In London, planners are working on the Thames Estuary 2100 project, a massive upgrade of the already formidable Thames Barrier, to ensure the city’s protection.
Around the US, a federal buyout scheme has paid more than 40,000 homeowners to relocate from flooded coastal areas and is now considering how to handle potentially a million more claims in the next few decades.
All these places are preparing for, or already addressing, the triple threat of sea level rise, increased storm surges and intense rainfall that come with climate change, and the devastating impacts they have on coastal areas.
And in Ireland? A Government steering group is working on a scoping exercise that is to eventually lead to a ‘national coastal change management strategy’.
In other words, we’re still on the starting block and the scoping report is already two years and four months overdue. The Government’s chief climate advisers are worried.
The country is without clear plans for how to protect property, infrastructure, livelihoods and lives from the increasingly extreme conditions climate change will throw at us, of which flooding is our most immediate risk.
“We need the plan,” said Marie Donnelly, chair of the Climate Change Advisory Council. How soon? “Yesterday.”
The reason for the urgency was made clear at the European Climate Change Adaptation Conference in Dublin this week, where the case studies above were presented.
It followed a weekend of extraordinarily intense rain in parts of the country, with flash flooding in Tralee described as “biblical”.
A report by the World Meteorological Organisation and the EU’s Copernicus climate change service launched at the conference said temperature and sea levels were rising faster in Europe than in the rest of the world.
Evidence of this is already available in studies led by the Icarus team at Maynooth University, who reported last year that the sea level in Dublin Bay was rising at twice the global rate.
An increase of 7mm a year was recorded in Dublin from 1997 to 2016.
Under current projections, Dublin is likely to see a further rise of 20cm by 2050 and 60-100cm by 2100 depending on how global climate commitments are honoured. The pattern will be repeated right around our coasts.
“We have our major cities beside the sea and we know that by 2080 they’ll be largely submerged (if action is not taken),” Ms Donnelly said.
“It looks and feels like a long time away but if we’re going to take preventative action, we have to do it now.”
The issue hasn’t been entirely ignored. In Dublin, new buildings in known flood zones since 2010 have had to have higher ground floors to take account of future sea level rise. Flood protection works on the city’s rivers are also planned or under way.
Stopping the sea from inundating the city is much more complex, however.
Dr Darren Clarke, who lectures in environmental geography at Dublin City University, presented to the conference the case of the Clontarf sea wall project.
Twenty years in the making, with endless rows and a lot of public money spent in between, it is still not finalised.
“One of the things we found strongly in our research was place attachment,” he said. People in Clontarf valued their seaside setting and didn’t want to be separated from it by an intrusive barrier, regardless of the risks.
“It raises real questions around how adaptation is planned and implemented,” Dr Clarke said. “Policymakers are facing really difficult questions over the next few decades.”
In Cork, there is strong opposition to plans to raise the quay walls in the city centre, with opponents urging a more complex and costly tidal barrier system at the Lee’s mouth instead.
Consensus has to be worked at carefully and collaboratively, said Steven Trewhella of the Scottish government-funded ClimateXchange centre, who presented plans for flood control on Glasgow’s mighty Clyde River.
“We have to be very careful not to make this a technical issue because it’s about people,” he said.
In the case of the Clyde, the tide runs 34km upstream, taking in an area that touches on 11 local authorities. That’s a lot of people with a lot of different perspectives to accommodate.
There is also a lot of politics involved.
“Bold decisions affect electability,” said Jeanette Dubinin of the Centre for Planning Excellence in Louisiana, where some of the most high-profile relocation programmes in the US are taking place.
“You might have a bold idea but won’t be around to implement it because you won’t get elected.”
The result of that is too often programmes that react to crises, rather than preparing for them.
Already in Portrane, Co Dublin, and in Co Wexford, homes have been lost to the sea and many other coastlines are vulnerable.
“We think we can build our way out of everything with technical solutions,” said Dr Darren Clarke.
“We think, ‘We’re a developed country, we can throw money at this.’ But that’s not the case – without adaptation measures, we need to start looking at relocation as an option.”
Marie Donnelly wants the scoping report, whenever it comes, to kickstart discussion on all the options.
“We can do like they’ve done elsewhere – I’d refer to the tidal barrier in the UK for example. We’ll have to think about things like that,” she said.
“If we can preventatively spend money, we can save money and make people safer. But we do need a comprehensive plan and we need the Government to have the courage to… tell people why they’re developing a plan.
“I don’t know that we’re actually communicating to people what the risks are.”
(Source – Irish Independent – Environment – Caroline O Doherty – 24/06/2023)