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

Ireland’s Environment – An Integrated Assessment 2020 4. natural capital investment for ecosystem resilience and regeneration, including restoration of carbon-rich habitats and climate-friendly agriculture 5. clean research and development spending, including rural support scheme spending, particularly that associated with sustainable agriculture. The OECD’s (2020) Building Back Better report on the opportunity to embrace a more sustainable recovery articulates five dimensions of ‘better’ that can act to guide policy decisions (Figure 1.2). Figure 1.2  Five dimensions of Building Back Better (after OECD, 2020) Wellbeing and inclusiveness Aligning with climate -neutral economy and society Improving supply chain resilience and circularity Strengthening climate resilience Reducing biodiversity loss Innovation building on behaviour changes Research by the OECD (2020), Bhattacharya et al. (2020), de Bruin and Monaghan (2020) and others suggests that investment in a green recovery package in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis is rational and will yield substantial economic returns and outperform its less green counterparts on a number of important policy metrics, and also deliver wellbeing co-benefits. The European Commission has made a clear commitment to a green recovery – proposing a €750 billion economic stimulus plan – and has articulated a sustainable finance taxonomy in support of this. This green taxonomy aims to ensure that investments correspond to a predefined set of environmental objectives (EU, 2020). 2. Wider Context to Protecting Ireland’s Environment Protection of our waters, air, soil, ecosystems and biodiversity should not be considered as merely an ambition driven by altruism, as these systems and species provide essential supporting services for our wellbeing and our economy. It is time for a holistic approach through the articulation of an overarching national policy position for the environment that will drive commitment and underpin coherence. Since the publication of the EPA’s sixth state of the environment report in 2016 (EPA, 2016), there is a much greater level of awareness in Ireland and globally that humanity has already significantly damaged and altered the planet on which we depend. More than 80 per cent of Irish citizens surveyed for the recently published Eurobarometer (EC, 2020) agreed that environmental issues have a direct effect on their daily life and their health – with no strong urban/rural difference. This survey also reported that, in Ireland, climate change is ranked as the most important environmental concern (57% of respondents), followed by waste (53%), water pollution (42%) and air pollution (37%). Twenty-nine per cent of Irish respondents expressed concern about agricultural pollution and 81 per cent agreed that their consumption habits adversely affect the environment in Europe and the rest of the world. And yet, we remain locked into fossil fuel dependency, which in turn is adding more heat to the planet and will result in even greater problems in the future unless we radically reduce our reliance on such fuels. As an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, Ireland is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and changing weather patterns and has a major stake in ensuring that the world acts now to decarbonise our energy systems and to protect humanity and the natural world on which we depend from the inevitable consequences of the changes already made to our climate. These challenges are put rather starkly in the recently published Climate Change Adaptation Plan for the Health Sector (2019-2024) (Government of Ireland, 2019), which states that: Without decisive adaptation action, climate change will have profound impacts for the health and wellbeing of people in Ireland, for the smooth delivery of our health and social care services, and for our critical infrastructure. 26