EPA - Ireland's Environment, An Integrated Assessment - 2020

Ireland’s Environment – An Integrated Assessment 2020 Executive Summary An Integrated Assessment of the State of Ireland’s Environment The evidence from this assessment reveals that the overall quality of Ireland’s environment is not what it should be, and the outlook is not optimistic unless we accelerate the implementation of solutions across all sectors and society. The environmental challenges that Ireland faces are giving rise to complex and systemic issues. They cut across different environmental topics, such as climate, air, soil, water, biodiversity and waste, and across organisations and sectors, business and all levels of society. They are taxing economically, sociologically, technically and administratively. These challenges include the protection of health and wellbeing and ecosystems and reducing emissions and the consumption of resources. They are forcing a fundamental reconsideration of how we produce and consume, how we invest, how land use change affects the environment, and how we plan for the future. Climate change, and the disruption that will flow from it, is influencing the established economic, social and natural structures of our world. We are also witnessing the erosion of ecosystems and biodiversity on an unprecedented scale. We seem unable to stem the tide of nature’s destruction and may not fully understand its full impact until it is too late. Opportunely, there are synergies between the solutions to many of the challenges we face. Biodiversity protection, land use and Ireland’s transition to a climate-neutral, climate-resilient society are linked, for example, and can be worked on together. Protection of our waters, air, soil, ecosystems and biodiversity is not to be considered as merely an ambition driven by altruism, as these systems and species provide essential supporting services for our wellbeing and our economy. There are lots of national plans and programmes that address individual environmental challenges, with many notable successes. To deliver the full intent and potential of these policies we need, however, to close gaps in implementation. These multiple plans also suffer from a coherence challenge as they are devised in the absence of a single, overarching, national environmental policy position. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on Ireland’s economy; the degree to which this impact will impede national environmental policy ambitions – including the transition to a climate-neutral economy – remains to be seen. As we emerge from the pandemic crisis and look to stimulate economic recovery we should do so through a ‘green investment’ lens and so avoid technical and infrastructural spend that locks us into carbon-intensive, and otherwise unsustainable, consumption and production behaviours and technologies. A clean and safe environment provides the opportunity to deliver health and economic dividends that will assist resilience and support recovery. In this ‘reset’ of our economy we have an opportunity to pivot away from unsustainable practices and deliver the lasting, systemic changes needed to deliver on our environmental ambitions, as already outlined in many sector plans, programmes and strategies. 12