ACTIVITY UPDATE

ACTIVITY UPDATE By Kieran Flood, IWT Coordinator IWT & Galway Community College – Climate & Biodiversity Research Project

The Galway Community College Group on a field trip with Spanish project partners

This year the IWT is working with Galway Community College (GCC) as part of an Erasmus+ project on Climate Change Studies and Research in the European Union.

This winter IWT Junior members will be receiving an insert with their magazine produced by the class at GCC. The magazine insert is a list of Irish endangered species being studied by students at the college.

This project is a research collaboration between three schools from three different countries working with national wildlife NGOs to research and compile information about locally endangered species. As well as the IWT collaboration these include Prva Susacka Hrvatska Gimnazija in Rijeka, Croatia which will work with EKO wildlife and Felix Muriel in Spain who will work with Sociedade Galega De Historia Natural.

Fifteen students from each school will research and compile information on designed templates for the endangered species including: classification, natural history, abundance, causes of decline and possible corrective actions.

Students will also take part in field studies where possible to fully understand some of the pressures facing these species. These records will be published and disseminated as widely as possible through local print and social media as well multiplier events held at city hall in Galway once a year. Some audio-visual elements of the project will be filmed and we have a commitment from our national broadcaster to air some of these on young people TV programs.

Where possible students will implement recommended corrective actions by working with our local council, politicians, influencers and voluntary groups. Erasmus Coordinator at GCC Tom Flanagan who will be overseeing the project says “this project comes at a time when the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest report states the outlook for Ireland’s environment is not optimistic unless we accelerate the implementation of solutions across all sectors and society. Climate and biodiversity are two of the key challenges we need to address. Projects like this are much needed to raise awareness to help try and halt the continuous degradation of the natural environment”.

For more information visit www.galwaycc.ie/page/Erasmus-Project To download the a copy Species Report visit our website here https://iwt.ie/what-we-do/education/galway-erasmus

IWT Monaghan Branch

County Monaghan is in the process of setting up a new local branch of the Irish Wildlife Trust. The Facebook page is live and the mycelium is slowly spreading - we plan to become an official fruiting body with our launch early in 2022. In the meantime, we will be winding down 2021 and enjoying "the winking glitter of (many) a frosty dawn" [Patrick Kavanagh] in the drumlin county. We are really excited to be joining the IWT family and look forward to being an active member of the national network. The branch can be contacted on Email: monaghanbranch@ iwt.ie / Facebook: www. facebook.com/iwtmonaghan/"

CAMPAIGN UPDATE By Pádraic Fogarty

IWT at COP

 A scene from the streets of Glasgow during COP26

For the rst time, the Irish Wildlife Trust attended the conference of the parties (COP) to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). is is referred to as COP26 for short and lest anyone be confused there is a separate COP for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which started in October (COP15) and will conclude in the Chinese city of Kunming in early 2022. e UNFCCC and the CBD are both children of the Rio Earth summit which was held in 1992 and so can be seen as the most important elements of the global, multi-lateral response to the planetary crisis, dealing with climate and biodiversity respectively. e work at the COPs in relation to biodiversity builds upon that of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Congress which was held in Marseille in

CAMPAIGN UPDATE By Pádraic Fogarty

 Scenes from inside the COP26 conference centre

September (and also attended by IWT) as well as the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). While the international response to the crisis has been slow and faltering, the architecture for dealing with them has been firmly in place for many decades through these various bodies and agreements. Protesters are right to point out that these have been talking shops and platforms for greenwashing but they remain the best hope we have for collective action. There is no world government or police force, so the only way of getting any agreement is through lots and lots of talking (something we should all agree is better than waring). A

fair criticism of the process however is that it has only been talking, with action still not being taken to any meaningful degree. COP26 has been accompanied by an unprecedented level of media attention and this has to be welcomed. There’s no doubt that "WHILE THERE IS STILL A political will to LONG WAY TO GO IT WAS do anything is in ENCOURAGING TO SEE THE terribly short NUMBER OF JOURNALISTS WHO TRAVELLED FROM IRELAND AND GAVE IT THE supply, but the media failings in the past decade have contributed ANALYSIS IT DESERVED". significantly to our current predicament. Forever headlining articles with the cost of action (rather than the cost of inaction), poorly reporting the science, giving climate change only sporadic and superficial attention while still virtually ignoring the biodiversity crisis are all on the chargesheet. This has left the public unsure and ill-equipped to respond to the growing urgency of the situation. So, while there is still a long way to go it was encouraging to see the number of journalists who travelled from Ireland and gave it the analysis it deserved.

The COP26 also made some significant progress on ending deforestation, reducing methane emissions, ending the

use of coal and adding pressure on countries to improve, as well as increase the frequency of their reporting of emissions. Throughout much of the event, optimism was in short supply, but late in the second week an announcement from China and the US, the world’s two biggest polluters, that they will cooperate more closely on reducing emissions, gave a welcome boost to morale. The final declaration claims to have kept alive the hope of staying within 1.5 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels that was widely seen as the benchmark of success for this COP. However, it was never going to be the ‘now or never’ moment that was sometimes portrayed. The actual work has yet to begin (emissions are still going up) and the parties will meet again in 2022 for COP27 in Egypt. While the proceedings of these events can be very difficult to decipher, it’s vital that people watching from the outside understand that this is an issue that we will be dealing with for the foreseeable future. It is not something that will one day be ‘solved’ but will be a twisting and turning road that will progress in fits and starts.

Just as every day that passes without

CAMPAIGN UPDATE By Pádraic Fogarty

action will make matters worse, there is never a point where action cannot be taken to make things better.

And there are lots of actions that can be taken. On decarbonising the economy, the technologies are essentially available – wind and solar power generation. Battery storage has a way to go but the mood at COP26 was that increased investment in research and development will see substantial improvements in this field and so plug the gaps when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. The transformation of many cities, such as Paris and Barcelona, where car dependency is being reduced and more space is being devoted to trees and greenery, is already underway.

There is ever growing awareness that what we eat is inextricably linked to climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse and there’s no doubt that people are making decisions to reduce meat consumption in particular. People are waking up to the fact that our natural environment, which we have taken for granted as being ‘green’ and ‘healthy’ is in fact degraded and polluted.

Nature, sadly, is still not getting the attention it deserves. On the one hand, COP26 was unprecedented in the number of events around nature and biodiversity. Peatlands, nature-based solutions, rain forests (and forests in

general) as well as oceans were all subjected to numerous and high level discussions. An announcement that four countries in Latin America: Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Ecuador, are to create an enormous marine protected area across their patch of the Pacific Ocean shows what can be done. "THERE IS EVER GROWING One the other hand, there was AWARENESS THAT WHAT WE EAT IS clearly a sense that nature is only INEXTRICABLY LINKED TO CLIMATE useful in so far as it can sequester BREAKDOWN AND ECOSYSTEM COLLAPSE AND THERE’S NO DOUBT THAT PEOPLE ARE MAKING and store carbon. Talks I attended on financing for nature-based solutions showed how the money is only flowing so that wealthy DECISIONS TO REDUCE MEAT companies in wealthy countries can CONSUMPTION IN PARTICULAR". buy carbon credits to claim that they are offsetting their continued emissions back home. Nature restoration will need a lot of money and we know that national governments will be happy to leave it to the private sector but ultimately this is an unregulated, ‘voluntary’ market. It seems to me that it is a very high-risk

 Indigenous peoples led the protest march in Glasgow

strategy which will not only not result in reduced emissions of greenhouse gases but will lead to poor outcomes for nature if local communities are not centred in decision-making, or if, as is now happening more and more frequently, natural ecosystems turn from carbon sinks to carbon emitters as a result of fires, droughts, pests etc. I got no sense that private investors are willing to use their money to protect and restore ecosystems because they are the foundation of life on earth. Thus, the only logical conclusion is that ultimately public money will be needed for this task using taxation on rich individuals and companies. There were no talks that I saw which were discussing this.

It is abundantly clear that we cannot meet climate goals without protecting nature, and simultaneously we cannot address the biodiversity crisis without stabilising the climate. Yet it seems that we’re still only beginning to appreciate the salience of this interaction.

Ireland was well represented at COP26 with many dozens of scientists, activists and politicians. Taoiseach Micheál Martin addressed the opening plenary and announced that Ireland would be joining a push to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas but one which degrades relatively quickly in the atmosphere, so reducing emissions would be a quick win in terms of temperature reductions. In Ireland nearly all methane comes from cattle but it quickly became apparent that the Irish government doesn’t intend to reduce emissions by 30%, instead noting that it was a global, not a country specific target.

This is also an approach that Ireland has taken to the headline biodiversity target being discussed at COP15 in China. Here, there is a major push to protect at least 30% of land and sea by 2030. Ireland has supported this, and the 30% target at sea is in the programme for government, but has so far insisted that on land this should not apply to us. It’s a very disappointing approach that implies that someone else needs to do all the work. COP15 will bring clarity to these decisions in 2022 and IWT "IT IS ABUNDANTLY CLEAR THAT WE CANNOT MEET CLIMATE GOALS WITHOUT PROTECTING NATURE, AND SIMULTANEOUSLY WE CANNOT ADDRESS THE BIODIVERSITY CRISIS WITHOUT STABILISING THE CLIMATE".

hopes to be there.

It’s easy to be despondent when faced with governmental double speak. We all know we’re in the most serious crisis that humanity has ever faced and yet some of the easy things that could be done are not being done, e.g. closing off areas of ocean

 A poster seen in Glasgow during COP

to industrial fishing and ending new licences for plantations of monoculture trees. But it’s also undeniable that the ground is shifting rapidly. Political decisions that were only recently out of the question are entering the frame. The question still remains: will the response be fast enough and strong enough? This is just as relevant at the national as it is the global level. So far, the answer is no. Has COP26 moved things on? Yes. But we mustn’t lose momentum. We must keep the pressure on. Perhaps you have read this and wondered, what can I do? You can phone or email your local politician to express your concern. Tell them there is no time to lose. Tell them they need to be more ambitious.Tell them they need to act like our lives depend upon it.