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

Chapter 16: Conclusions Topic Box 16.2 The EEA Seven Key Areas to get Europe Back on Track to Achieve its 2030 and 2050 Goals and Ambitions The seven key areas identified by the EEA are as follows (EEA, 2019): 1. Strengthening policy implementation, integration and coherence. Full implementation of existing policies would take Europe a long way towards achieving its environmental goals up to 2030. 2. Developing more systemic, long-term policy frameworks and binding targets. The coverage of long-term policy frameworks needs to be extended to other important systems and issues, starting with the food system, chemicals and land use. 3. Leading international action towards sustainability. Europe cannot achieve its sustainability goals in isolation. The EU has significant diplomatic and economic influence, which it can use to promote the adoption of ambitious agreements in areas such as biodiversity and resource use. 4. Fostering innovation throughout society. Changing trajectory will depend critically on the emergence and spread of diverse forms of innovation that can trigger new ways of thinking and living. 5. Scaling up investments and reorienting finance. Although achieving sustainability transitions will require major investments, Europeans stand to gain hugely – both because of avoided harms to nature and society and because of the economic and social opportunities that they create. 6. Managing risks and ensuring a socially fair transition. Successful governance of sustainability transitions will require that societies acknowledge potential risks, opportunities and trade-offs, and devise ways to navigate them. Policies have an essential role in achieving ‘just transitions’. 7. Linking knowledge with action. Achieving sustainability transitions will require diverse new knowledge, drawing on multiple disciplines and types of knowledge production. This includes evidence about the systems driving environmental pressures, pathways to sustainability, promising initiatives and barriers to change. On an annual basis, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland also publishes environmental information online that includes data comparing Ireland’s performance with other countries. The latest report, Environmental Indicators Ireland 2020 , provides indicators that compare Ireland with other EU Member States for the latest year for which data are available (CSO, 2020). In many cases, the CSO comparisons use data provided by the EPA and EEA. The global and environmental economy domains are also covered by the CSO. Some of the benchmarked areas highlighted by the CSO in its main findings include performance around air pollutant emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, land use, energy and biodiversity. 429