Ireland's excessive emissions mean climate goals 'are increasingly out of reach'

The Journal

2 days ago

This is an extract from the most recent edition of Temperature Check, The Journal's monthly climate newsletter. To receive Temperature Check to your inbox, sign up in the box at the end of this article.
As schools wrap up for the summer, the government has been handed a report card of its own: the Environmental Protection Agency's
projections of Ireland's emissions
in the coming years.
The EPA analysed the climate policies and measures that the government is planning to take and how those would impact greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2055.
If all of the planned measures and policies are fully implemented, they would reduce Ireland's emissions by 2030 to 23% less than what they were in 2018 – falling far short of the national 51% 2030 target.
Not only is the new projection below the target, it's also a decrease on the projection made last year, when the EPA said it expected a reduction of 29% could be made by 2030.
Responding to the projections
, Minister for Climate Darragh O'Brien said the government has 'made real progress' but is aware that 'we need to move faster to meet our 2030 climate targets'.
The projections show Ireland is at significant risk of missing both national and EU climate targets.
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Manager of the Centre for Environmental Justice Clodagh Daly has said the poor progress highlighted by the projections is 'undermining Ireland's capacity to deliver a planned and inclusive transition'.
Speaking to
The Journal
for Temperature Check, Daly said the weak performance is particularly worrying in the context of climate change impacts becoming increasingly visible in Ireland.
'We've seen increased heat extremes, heavy precipitation, storm events like Storm Éowyn, and so it's really concerning that the government is going backwards on its emission reduction obligations,' she said.
Fianna Fáil's Darragh O'Brien was appointed Minister for Climate, Environment and Energy and Minister for Transport as part of the new government in January 2025.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
The EPA report compares Ireland's projected emissions with the carbon budgets that were designed to set limits on how much the country emits over five-year cycles.
The margins by which the carbon budgets are likely to be exceeded, particularly for the budget covering 2026 to 2030, are staggering.
The first budget, which allowed 295 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2eq) to be emitted between 2021 and 2025, is projected to be exceeded by between 8 and 12 Mt CO2eq.
The second budget over the subsequent five years is projected to be exceeded by the significant margin of 77 to 114 Mt CO2eq.
To put that in context, the total budget for 2026 to 2030 is 200 Mt CO2eq. That means that at the EPA's upper estimate, Ireland's emissions could be more than 50% higher across those years than what they legally should be.
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And that's before you even start to look at what it means for complying with European Union obligations. The EPA projects that Ireland will not meet its EU Effort Sharing Regulation target of a 42% reduction by 2030 (of emissions in sectors included under the ESR), instead looking more likely to reduce those emissions by only 22%.
'The problem is that if we continue to overshoot our legislative carbon budgets, the goals of the Paris Agreement and Ireland's Climate Act are increasingly out of reach,' Daly said.
'As the Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly warned, any overshoots of the budgets will have to be compensated for in subsequent carbon budgets, and that makes it really difficult to achieve.'
The Centre for Environmental Justice, which is based out of the Community Law and Mediation legal centre, already has two active court cases against the State over what it argues are shortfalls in previous iterations of the annual Climate Action Plan.
'The State already is facing the legal consequences of not staying within the carbon budget,' Daly said.
'One case is challenging the Climate Action Plan 2023's failure to sufficiently detail how it will reduce emissions in line with the carbon budget program,' she said.
The other case sees the legal centre joined by a grandfather, a youth climate activist and a child to challenge the 2024 plan for 'failure to reduce emissions in line with our carbon budget programme, and that, as a result, we claim that there are fundamental rights breaches under the Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Charter of Fundamental Rights'.
'We're not asking the court to impose any kind of sanction in terms of financial penalties. What we're asking the court to do is to strike down the plans as they are and for the government just to go back, review the plan, and develop a new one that actually is aligned with the law.'
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