Ireland's State of the Environment Report 2024

477 Chapter 17: Conclusions 3. Key challenges and priorities for Ireland’s environment 2 Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021. 3 www.epa.ie/our-services/monitoring--assessment/climate-change/irelands-climate-change-assessment-icca/ (accessed 12 September 2024). Delivering a national policy position on the environment We urgently need to have a national policy position on the environment to address the complex interactions, synergies and trade-offs across environmental policy areas and to deal with its interactions with other policy domains. Since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published its last State of the Environment Report in 2020 (EPA, 2020), Ireland has set a national objective to transition to a climate-resilient, biodiversity-rich, environmentally sustainable and climate-neutral economy by 2050. 2 Achieving this multifaceted objective will be the most complex and interconnected environmental challenge for the next 25 years, and each step towards its achievement will present opportunities and challenges. Environmental policy responses to date have been insufficient to halt environmental decline, and many of Ireland’s agreed environmental targets will not be met in the short term or will be delivered late. Despite progress in some areas, the scale and speed of improvements are clearly insufficient to meet long-term EU and national objectives such as those covering water quality, nature protection and the ambition to achieve a climate-neutral economy and climate neutrality by 2050. Tackling these complex and interlinked challenges will require the development of more integrated, coherent and ambitious environmental policy frameworks. In this context, a central message of the 2020 State of the Environment Report was a call for a national policy position on the environment, which to date has not been delivered (EPA, 2020). A key benefit of a national policy position would be improvements in policy coherency and setting out the country’s ambition for the environment for the next generation. The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development called on all countries to enhance policy coherence as an essential means of implementation of all the SDGs. Policy coherence requires effective and inclusive governance and institutional mechanisms to address policy interactions across sectors, including identifying and managing trade-offs and aligning actions between different levels of government. To avoid inefficiencies and duplication of effort, there is a strong need for clarity around roles and responsibilities and for effective collaboration and engagement. There will be many complex challenges to overcome and trade-offs to be addressed along the way, which will require a deep level of collaboration to address climate, air pollution and biodiversity issues. This will require all sectors of society to work together to deliver these changes. Some opportunities are clear. We have opportunities to address more than one issue by one action, for example by tackling climate and air quality issues together. Ireland’s Climate Change Assessment 3 also emphasises that tackling climate change and biodiversity loss together enhances the many synergies that exist between actions to address these crises while minimising and managing any remaining trade- offs. In this context, the EPA sees a policy position on the environment as a crucial element of delivering a shared, whole-of-government vision to protect Ireland’s environment, guide implementation, support integration and provide the policy coherence we need to tackle these complex problems.