Ireland's State of the Environment Report 2024

465 Chapter 16: Environmental Policy Implementation and Performance Effective monitoring Monitoring and reporting on the implementation of plans and programmes has been shown to support better implementation. Publishing monitoring reports improves public access to information and increases the accountability of implementing bodies. Well- designed indicators can help to identify implementation shortcomings and signal where interventions or new approaches may be needed. Nationally, having a standardised set of environmental indicators aligned to key policy objectives would enable planners and policymakers to integrate these from the outset, supporting their delivery. Opportunities to share environmental indicator data would also help improve data quality and consistency and reduce the administrative and financial burden on public bodies. Strategic foresight Many ‘drivers of change’ that impact the environment are not of an environmental nature but have a significant impact on Ireland’s and Europe’s long-term environmental and sustainability outlook. As a result, there has been growing interest in anticipatory knowledge and strategic foresight, both in Ireland (OECD, 2021b) and internationally (OECD, 2023d) with a view to strengthening strategic policy discussions and designing more effective policies. Key drivers of change identified by the EEA include population growth; increasing urbanisation and global migration; accelerating technological change; global power shifts; climate change and environmental degradation; increasing scarcity of and global competition for resources; and diversifying values, lifestyles and governance approaches (EEA, 2020). Improved understanding of drivers of change and global megatrends should support better environmental policies and outcomes. The EEA recommends that reviews of existing European policies and plans are needed to make sure they are as resilient as possible and also dynamic enough to adapt to changes experienced. Public engagement The successful implementation of environmental policies and plans requires engagement, support and behavioural change from businesses, communities and citizens. Overcoming the barriers to individual and collective climate action, for example, necessitates understanding people’s beliefs and attitudes and the challenges they face and providing positive support to incentivise change. Citizens can more effectively protect the environment if they can rely on the three ‘pillars’ of the Aarhus Convention: access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters (EC, 2022). Ireland’s Second National Implementation Plan for the Sustainable Development Goals 2022-2024 (DECC, 2022a) includes many actions around public engagement and partnerships to embed the principle of ‘leaving no one behind’. The OECD, however, identifies the need for Ireland to develop more transparent and open stakeholder engagement mechanisms, noting that consultation practices do not yet operate on a systematic basis across government departments (OECD, 2022b). On access to environmental information, the Commission reports that Ireland’s implementation of the INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC) has been poor and that more efforts are needed to make spatial data more widely accessible, particularly high-value data sets (EC, 2022), while, on access to justice, the Commission identifies the very high costs of bringing legal action in Ireland as a very significant obstacle to accessing justice. It states that the Irish government needs to do more to address the prohibitively high costs of legal action, to better inform the public about their rights to access justice and to ensure that abusive strategic lawsuits against public participation, designed to deter legitimate access to environmental justice, are identified and prevented via the appropriate means (EC, 2022).