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

Ireland’s Environment – An Integrated Assessment 2020 The People Dimension and Community Engagement To succeed, the development and implementation of environmental plans and programmes requires engagement and buy-in from businesses, farming, local communities and individuals. Communities, citizens and businesses need to be supported and empowered to protect and improve their environment. Both the climate action and the sustainable development agendas recognise the need for social considerations to be better factored into environmental and sectoral policymaking, to ensure a just transition and deliver on the broader range of the SDGs. This is reflected in the Commission’s Green Deal, which focuses on enabling European citizens and businesses to benefit from the shift to a sustainable future in a way that is just and socially fair. Implementation Requires Investment Ultimately, improving the implementation of environmental policies, plans and programmes will require much greater levels of investment. This includes increased public funding for critical services such as water and wastewater treatment infrastructure and public transport. More widely, sustainable finance options will be needed to fund solutions and investment in green technologies, as well as funding for nature and community projects, monitoring, regulation and oversight. Securing this scaled-up investment hinges on political will, underpinned by public support. Measuring Performance is Central to Driving Implementation To improve implementation, developments are needed in how the performance of environmental and sectoral plans, policies and strategies are tracked and measured. It is difficult to gauge progress without tangible targets. Implementation improves when plans/programmes contain objectives, measures and actions that are measurable, verifiable and reportable. Monitoring of the environmental performance of plans/programmes could be improved with the development of a standardised set of objectives, targets and indicators for different environmental media, at difference scales. Opportunities for the sharing of resources and data would lessen the financial burden of monitoring. Performance data should be publicly available, for example by the publication of annual indicator reports Learning from Good Practice Ireland already has many examples of delivering positive results for environmental protection where there are clear policies, commitments and resources, including the regulation of industry and LIFE nature conservation projects. The Water Framework Directive governance structures provide a positive example of collaboration across multiple public authorities, while on the enforcement side, the NIECE network for compliance and enforcement is an internationally recognised example of good practice. Improvements in Building Energy Ratings were driven by changes in the building regulations. In terms of public engagement, recent positive developments include the National Water Forum, the local authority Community Water Officers, the Citizen’s Assembly and the National Dialogue on Climate Action. There are also some promising signs that improved policy coherence is starting to emerge. For example, the NECPs are intended to improve consistency between energy and climate policies and could therefore become a good practice example of how to link sector-specific policies with other interlinked themes such as agriculture-nature- water and transport-air-noise-health, with a view to fostering synergies and delivering co-benefits. Similarly, the Ag-Climatise roadmap currently being developed by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine seeks to link agriculture-climate-air-ecosystems. At the EU level, improved levels of environmental and cross-sectoral policy coherence are evident in the revised Bioeconomy Strategy, Circular Economy Package and the Green Deal. Building on these collective findings, some suggested enablers for improving Ireland’s implementation, integration and monitoring of environmental legislation, policy, plans and programmes are presented in Table 15.2. 406