renewable energy magazine
Carbon budgets: Moving from climate ambition to climate action MaREI Director Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir discusses the role of carbon budgets in the interface between climate ambition to climate action and explores some of the tough choices that need to be made in relation to pathways. Ó Gallachóir, a member of the enhanced Climate Change Advisory Council’s carbon budgets committee, believes that climate ambition has tended to focus on the end goals, rather than on the pathways required to get there. Discussing the enshrinement in policy of the 30 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions target in 2019, later raised to 51 per cent through the Programme for Government and bolstered by a net-zero carbon
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target by 2050, Ó Gallachóir says: “These endpoint targets are very important but they are not the full story. The pathway to get to that endpoint is critical and carbon budgets play a key role in that.” Ó Gallachóir highlights that a climate neutrality objective by 2050 does not outline a pathway and examples the challenge in this by posing the question: “Do we look to a linear trajectory, or do we approach this in a different way?”
When seeking an answer to such a question, the academic states that it is worth reflecting on the past. From 1990 Ireland’s emissions grew to a peak in 2005, correlating with significant economic growth. A 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, while welcomed, cannot be credited to successful climate policy alone, when considering the effect of the economic recession and the Covid19 pandemic on emission reductions. Ó Gallachóir is quick to point out that
