Sharon Higgins: How Irish factories plan to meet their climate change obligations
Government and industry must collaborate to reduce the dependency on carbon. File image: iStock
Spanning successful indigenous companies to large-scale global companies, Irish manufacturing is one of the high-performing engines of our economy. However, this is shaping up to be a pivotal decade for emissions and climate change, as well as many other challenges.
Having emerged from the financial recession a decade ago, Ireland has encountered a pandemic, the great challenge of climate change, changes to the global tax regime, and Brexit.
In isolation, any of these challenges would be substantial, but together they require even deeper levels of resilience and adaptation.
Irish manufacturing employs 260,000 people, or over 12% of total employment.
In the late 1960s, Ireland’s main exports were live cattle. Now in 2021, it is a leader in Europe across a broad range of products, including pharma, technology, med-tech, and food and dairy products.
According to the Organisation for Cooperation and Development, about half of all Irish private-sector employees depend on foreign demand.
As the global economy grapples with the major challenge of climate change, Ireland must break the link between growing economies and populations and the environmental harm that they can entail.
Ireland’s commitment to break away from depending on fossil fuels, and to develop an environmentally sustainable society by 2050, is as much an economic objective as it is an environmental obligation.
The very real threat of global climate change requires Government and industry to collaborate to reduce the dependency on carbon and to manage industrial activities more sustainably.
We know from a recent survey of Ibec members in manufacturing that the immediate challenges over the next six months are to do with increasing costs and supply chain issues.
We also know that they have been very focused on tackling sustainability. That focus will only increase into the future.
Ibec fully supports the Government’s ambition to achieve a 51% reduction in emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050.
That is more ambitious than the 2019 Climate Action Plan, but it needs to be so, in order to deliver the radical change.
By adopting a smart, evidence-based approach, we believe Ireland can emerge both better off and a global leader in sustainable enterprises. However, there are risks.
Ibec will soon issue a new roadmap on industry’s climate commitments and how it relates to the national goal to become net zero by 2050.
The Climate Act 2021, the EU Green Deal, and the national carbon budgets will help set the business agenda.
We see four priority themes for industry: water and waste water; climate action; the circular economy; and air quality.
To make an impact, we recommend practical actions, including adopting a cost-effective approach for each sector to reduce emissions; ramping-up public investment, bolstered by public-private partnerships where appropriate; providing regulatory certainty for heating and transport technologies; and strengthening financial and advisory supports for Irish firms.
We also recommend action on issues for the long-term supply of water, support from Government for businesses seeking to develop circular products and services, incentivising the phasing out of diesel, and promoting the switch to cleaner energy carriers such as bio-methane, bio-LPG, renewable electricity, as well as renewable hydrogen.
Government and industry will need to work together to identify workable solutions to enable Ireland to meet its targets in a way that is fair, cost-effective, and good for the economy.
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