Ireland's State of the Environment Report 2024

101 Chapter 4: Climate Change National Climate Change Risk Assessment The EPA has the responsibility of delivering Ireland’s first NCCRA (Topic Box 4.4). The NCCRA, to be completed in early 2025, will comprise a semi- quantitative risk assessment from which a prioritised national climate risk register will be produced. Resilience goals and adaptation planning Ireland has set the national objective of transitioning to a climate-resilient, biodiversity-rich, environmentally sustainable and climate-neutral economy by 2050 at the latest, and it has put in place governance and support to help achieve this objective. Adaptation progress would be further facilitated by specifying the climate scenario threshold that Ireland is planning to be resilient to by 2050. Internationally, there is a move towards minimum standards for adaptation planning that enable stakeholders to more clearly understand what range of potential futures should be planned for, requiring planning for resilience, for example, at stages along a climate projection of at least a 1.5-2°C global mean temperature rise by 2050. Such target ranges should be iterative and dynamic, and they should be updated as required based on climate observations and emissions inventory and projection updates. Adaptation planning in Ireland would also be strengthened by the adoption of a common framework for decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. This would support dynamic and/or threshold-based decision-making from the national to sectoral and local levels, providing clarity for stakeholders and improving the consistency of actions and adaptation outcomes across sectors. Adaptation plans should clearly establish the links required between specific plans and policies such as the Water Action Plan, the National Biodiversity Action Plan and the National Peatlands Strategy, with attention placed on nature-based solutions to adaptation where appropriate. Implementation The current implementation of adaptation measures is too slow and fragmented. We need to train and retain specialists and mainstream or ‘future-proof’ adaptation considerations among relevant professionals such as planners, engineers, ecologists, civil and public servants, financial professionals and health managers. Effective, equitable and just transformative actions will have mitigation and adaptation benefits, and will bring broader benefits for health, wellbeing, nature and sustainable economic development. It is therefore important that wider non-financial value metrics are considered when evaluating, selecting and implementing adaptation actions to ensure that Ireland achieves just and equitable resilience to the impacts of climate change. Topic Box 4.4  National Climate Change Risk Assessment The EPA is leading the provision of an NCCRA for Ireland. NCCRAs are aimed at supporting planning for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change impacts in Ireland, by assessing sectoral, cross-cutting, cascading and other risks in a systematic and comparable way to prioritise risks at a national level. The NCCRA will set out the priority impacts of climate change for Ireland in the form of a prioritised national climate risk register, which will provide a basis for making decisions on whether risks are acceptable to society or communities. This will be a systematic semi-quantitative iterative three-stage risk assessment process that (1) identifies, (2) assesses and (3) prioritises climate change risks, underpinned by consistent climate information and by accounting for uncertainty in climate projections. The NCCRA will: ■ put in place a robust, common method to improve the standard of national and sectoral climate change risk assessment in Ireland ■ identify and comparatively assess risks within and across sectors – including cascading, transboundary and cross-cutting risks ■ ensure risks outside existing adaptation sectors are captured ■ inform standardised adaptation planning and investment by producing a prioritised list of climate change risks at the national level ■ identify linkages between other plans, policies and risk assessments.