The Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss has today (Sunday, November 27) voted in favour of holding a referendum on an amendment to the constitution to protect biodiversity.

The assembly has also advocated that the proposed amendment should include a “range of protections for substantive and procedural environmental rights” for both people and nature.

The group of 99 randomly selected members of the public, together with their chair Dr. Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin, have also called for a radical overhaul of the national approach to managing biodiversity loss.

In total the Citizens’ Assembly adopted 17 key recommendations following the seventh meeting of the assembly this weekend at the Grand Hotel, Malahide, Co. Dublin. It also agreed a series of sector-specific recommendations.

The top three recommendations adopted by the assembly outlined that:

  • “The state must take prompt, decisive and urgent action to address biodiversity loss and restoration and must provide leadership in protecting Ireland’s biodiversity for future generations.”
  • “The assembly believes that the state has comprehensively failed to adequately fund, implement, and enforce existing national legislation, national policies, EU biodiversity-related laws and directives related to biodiversity. This must change.”
  • “The ambition of the state needs to be significantly increased to reflect the scale of Ireland’s biodiversity crisis. Adequate funding must be made available to address this crisis. This is likely to require substantial and sustained increases in expenditure, which should be made available immediately and guaranteed in the long term.”

Biodiversity

The other recommendations that were agreed reflected key areas of the assembly’s discussions since April of this year.

These included, for example, the national policy and strategic approach to the biodiversity crisis, funding to address biodiversity loss, and the role of communities, non-government organisations and industry.

Overall, the assembly said the recommendations that were adopted reflect “all sectors and aspects of Irish life”.

They range from recommendation 12 which highlights the role that the assembly believes the business community should play:

“The Irish business community needs to engage with biodiversity and show leadership in the same way that they have begun to engage with the issue of the climate crisis”.

To recommendation 11 which deals with food policy and outlines that:

“The state must work with all stakeholders to review Ireland’s current food policy in the context of the biodiversity crisis, particularly in agriculture and marine sectors, to balance between the affordability and quality of food.

“This review must take into consideration vulnerable sections of the population and ensure reasonable standards of living, and result in a plan to address these issues”.

Meanwhile, recommendation 13 underlines the assembly’s position on pesticide use in Ireland:

“In order to drastically reduce the use of pesticides in line with EU policy, the state should incentivise the domestic and commercial use of natural, cost-friendly alternatives.

“It should also regulate the use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers, while maintaining food security. This should coincide with the improvement of schemes for the safe disposal of unused hazardous materials, as well as their containers.”

Further discussions to take place

Members have now agreed during the weekend to seek an extension to their ongoing work on biodiversity from the Oireachtas which they said would facilitate further discussions on sector specific recommendations.

These include agriculture; freshwaters; marine and coastal environments; peatlands; forestry/woodlands/hedgerows; protected sites and species; invasive species; and urban and built environments.

The Citizens’ Assembly wants to produce a report on its discussions and recommendations that will then be presented to the government and Houses of the Oireachtas.

Dr. Ní Shúilleabháin said their seventh meeting was unique in that it was the first citizens’ assembly on biodiversity loss to have taken place “anywhere in the world”.

“We have made significant and major decisions including inserting a specific commitment to protecting biodiversity into Bunreacht na hEireann,” the chair of the assembly said.

“This demonstrates the level of priority that we believe needs to be afforded to environmental protection.

“The assembly has also endorsed new centralised structures for co-ordinating and implementing national policy on biodiversity loss to ensure that those laws and regulations to protect the environment that are already in place are properly enforced,” she added.