There is no security without climate action

• Published date: 26 March 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

According to the WMO, weather and climate extremes are either the root cause or serious aggravating factors that trigger displacement, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, health issues and more

In his opening address to the Fine Gael convention on Sunday, Harris highlighted five themes for his leadership: hope, enterprise, equality of opportunity, integrity and security. “Security” covered a broad range from welfare to housing, health services and policing. He mentioned climate change only in the context of helping farmers to transition to meet its challenges.

In fact, climate change risk and the security threats that it represent fall squarely within the taoiseach’s remit. The department publishes an annual national risk assessment, which highlighted in 2023 that interlocking risks “are even more significant than previously thought and demand a stronger global response and within a shorter time frame”.

The assessment stated that “it is well understood that the costs of inaction far exceed those of the necessary remedial action, in terms of risks to human health, economic development, preservation of infrastructure and ecosystems, as well as risks to food, water and energy security and population displacement/mass migration”.

When climate risks are properly considered in the context of all the functioning services that we rely on, the focus shifts away from abstract probabilities to thinking about worst-case scenarios and how to prevent them. Even with the Greens in Government, weakly joined-up policies are presented as if these are all that is needed to stave off the worst.

The Government is still not confronting the possibility that climate change could be much worse than the “average” outcomes described by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), especially as these reports describe a situation where determined global co-operation is driving down emissions at 8 per cent every year, something we are not yet seeing in practice.

The reality is that global emissions are still rising. A 2021 risk assessment report by the UK think tank Chatham House estimated there is a 10 per cent chance that any backsliding or stasis in emissions reduction policies could lead to a plausible worst case of 7 degrees of warming by the end of the century. If emissions follow the trajectory set by current national...