Opinion

Climate adaptation is the Cinderella of climate policy, too often under-resourced and ignored

Flooding, storm surges, erosion and heatwaves are already inevitable: it’s vital we prepare accordingly

Flooding in Midleton, Co Cork last October during Storm Babet. Irish rural and urban areas need to anticipate further extreme weather events as the climate continues to change. Photograph: Damien Rytel/PA Wire
Seán O'Leary
Tue Aug 13 2024 - 06:00

Over recent years Ireland has seen the reality of climate change, with communities across the country experiencing the effects of changing weather patterns and the impact of more extreme weather events such as storms and floods.

Who, for example, could forget the images of people using boats with fully immersed cars in the streets of Midleton, late last year? It underlined that while much of the focus remains on reducing emissions, Ireland is not doing enough to adapt its communities to address the damage that climate change is already causing – and the damage it will do in the future.

That neglect has been borne out in the policy arena, with much of the focus for policymakers being on mitigation action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and not on adapting society to our changing climate, which also needs urgent attention.

Climate adaptation, that is preparing for, and adjusting to, the now inevitable impacts of climate change, continues to be under-resourced and ignored. It is the “Cinderella” of Irish climate policy.

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It is notable that only approximately 14 per cent of the nearly 4,000 actions set out across the 31 recently adopted local authority climate action plans specifically relate to adaptation, despite local authorities having significant power and responsibility in preparing communities for climate impacts.

In particular, preparing the built environment for the changes that we are already seeing in the climate is crucial to communities across Ireland, be that to prepare towns and cities for flooding, storm surges and erosion, or our homes for heatwaves. Proper planning is critical to adaptation action in urban and rural areas alike, while the planning system is an important instrument for managing risks associated with flooding, heatwaves, air quality and our buildings.

As part of its commitments to address this the Government recently published Ireland’s second National Adaptation Framework (NAF), which seeks to give adaptation the sort of prominence and attention it requires to help communities overcome the climate challenges they are facing.

The new framework needs to embed climate adaptation considerations across Government decision-making in a much more meaningful and urgent way if we are to protect current and future infrastructure from the impacts of climate change.

The NAF expands on the legislative requirement to prepare a second round of statutory “sectoral adaptation plans”, designed to assist different areas of our society prepare for the impacts of climate change through adaptation action.

There has been some success to date in the development and delivery of sectoral adaptation plans, such as in agriculture and flood-risk management, where the Minister of Agriculture and Minister of State for the Office of Public Works respectively have clear responsibility for the area. However, it has been less successful in other areas, including communication networks, where a range of regulators and private sector organisations, such as mobile phone network operators, operate with less Government oversight.

The new NAF proposes that a sectoral adaptation plan is prepared for the planning system. However, there are some disadvantages to this approach, with much of the planning system delivered at local and regional level already working across a range of other sectors, including biodiversity, coasts, heritage, energy and flood-risk management.

Indeed, there is a danger that the need to prepare our built environment for future climate impacts could be lost in the ever increasing layers of spatial plans and policies that the planning system has to address. For example, the Planning and Development Bill will add even more layers of policy with which adaptation action and policy must align. Ensuring that the new sectoral adaptation plans recognise and complement existing and proposed planning policies will be critical to their success and adding a planning sectoral adaptation plan into the mix may not actually assist in bringing coherence.

The distance that adaptation policy still has to travel can be seen in the Climate Change Advisory Council’s annual adaptation scorecards, which highlight the limited progress Ireland has made in preparing our electricity networks for future climate impacts.

This confirms that significant attention must be paid, now, to how adaptation and resilience is considered in the forthcoming national, regional and local renewable electricity strategies, if we are to future-proof our electricity networks against the challenges of climate change.

The planning system will be a key part of delivering these strategies and this infrastructure, but how a planning sectoral adaptation plan and an already underperforming electricity networks sector will interact is far from clear.

As for the projected increase in temperatures and heatwaves due to climate change, there is limited understanding of what this means for overheating homes and commercial buildings, and research in this area by academics in Trinity College Dublin and the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is welcome.

Advances in building standards and technology have been important for climate mitigation, notably by increasing the energy efficiency of new and retrofitted homes. However, this also poses a risk of delivering increasingly uncomfortable or unsafe temperatures as our climate continues to change, with Irish homes typically being built to keep heat in, not let heat out.

Public understanding of all of these climate risks that our society faces needs to be significantly increased, or schemes that are designed to address climate adaptation such as flooding, sea-level rise or heatwaves will fall at the first hurdle. Similarly, adapting to climate change is not going to be all about building hard walls – we need a comprehensive national policy on deploying green nature-based solutions as well.

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It’s not yet clear if the new National Adaptation Framework or the next round of sectoral adaptation plans can cut through this complicated sphere and really transform our thinking, but we must realise the stable climate that society has based all our planning and building policies on can no longer be taken for granted.

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Dr Seán O’Leary is senior planner with the Irish Planning Institute and has previously advised on Government climate adaptation policy.