Transformational emission reductions are needed across energy, transport, agriculture and land use to meet Ireland’s national and international environmental commitments by 2030 and 2050, the director general of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has warned.

Laura Burke told the EPA’s Climate Change Conference 2023 today (Thursday, May 25) that in Ireland the LULUCF (land use, land-use change and forestry) sector accounts for 11% of the country’s total emissions and is a net source of emissions since 1990.

“The continued negative trends seen across Ireland’s greenhouse gas (GHG) and ammonia emissions, our water quality our biodiversity indicators highlight the importance of how we use our land and how we must move to work to protect and restore this life support system.

“As a nation we have a clear, cultural, social and economic interdependency on land and agriculture.

“This transcends our country’s history and it has shaped and changed our lands and our past and current land use.

“We came late by international standards to industrialization and urbanization and as a society we maintain our affinity and connection with the land, many of us if we are not directly from rural farming backgrounds, our parents our grandparents are from those types of backgrounds so we do have a really strong connection with the land in Ireland,” the EPA director general said.

Laura Burke, Director General of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Source: EPA

Burke outlined at the climate conference today at Dublin Castle that land and the agriculture sector was “a valuable national asset to provide secure food supply and economic resources supporting rural communities and national economic growth”.

She said that as Ireland looked towards its “carbon neutral future” land would play a key role in delivering green energy, opportunities for a more sustainable bioeconomy and also “in the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere”.

The EPA director general said: “Today our focus is on land and land use in the context of climate change and its role in the climate system.

“There are high levels of ambition for the use of land both at the EU, as well as a national level, including the role of land as a carbon sink as an opportunity for agricultural diversification actions such as rewetting, afforestation, increased organics, increased tillage are all referenced across different plans and strategies whether that be the Climate Action Plan, Food Vision or the proposed Nature Restoration Law and the findings of the recent Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity”.

But Burke also warned that there was a real need to “understand the impacts and implications” of all of the various plans and strategies and to see “how they’re going to work together in the context of land”.

She said “as with all climate change responses” the discussion about Ireland’s land use in the future should be based on the “best available science”.

“It should be inclusive, we need to avoid polarization, recognizing that change is difficult and that we are in uncharted territory – we don’t have all the answers but it’s important that we work to understand the challenges so that we can overcome them together.

“In this regard there is much work underway in Ireland to inform our understanding of land and how we currently use and can use it in the context of changing climate both in terms of mitigation but also in adaptation,” Burke added.

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