John Gibbons: The lie of the land — adapt or die

Does Ireland need to appoint a Ministry for the Future or a Future Generations Commissioner asks journalist and author John Gibbons in his new book The Lie of the Land

John Gibbons: "Ireland's dramatic shift towards the most polluting food sectors — driven by a small number of agribusiness giants and facilitated by the State — benefits the few while imposing huge costs on the many." Picture: Larry Cummins

As the world heats up, species are migrating away from the tropics and towards cooler climes. But for many species, the climate is changing far more quickly than they are capable of adapting to.

Humans are, of course, among the species being uprooted. In 2022, a record 32.6 million people were forcibly displaced as a result of floods, storms, wildfires and droughts. The Institute for Economics & Peace calculates that by 2050, upwards of a billion people will be climate refugees, driven from their homelands by environmental breakdown and the civil unrest and armed conflict it will trigger.

In the nearer term, the IEP projects that by 2040, around 5.4 billion people, over half the world’s population, will live in regions experiencing high or extreme water stress. As rivers often flow through multiple countries, the scope for geopolitical tensions and warfare over access to water is self-evident.

John Gibbons: "We must reimagine the ways in which we use the land. The agrifood sector accounts for 38% of Ireland's greenhouse emissions — and just 7% of gross national income."

I had the opportunity to see these impacts at first hand when, in early 2020, I travelled to Zambia to report on severe water and electricity shortages the country was facing as a result of persistent drought.35 In the three preceding years, water levels in Lake Kariba, the world’s largest artificial lake, had dropped by six metres. This severely limited hydroelectric production by the Kariba dam, which provides around half of the total electrical supply for Zambia and Zimbabwe. Years of severe drought were followed by torrential down-pours that destroyed crops and wrecked infrastructure that Zambia can ill afford to repair or replace. Energy shortages and crop failure have led many rural Zambians to cut down trees to sell as charcoal. As a result, over a quarter of a million hectares of forest are being cleared a year. 

"We don’t like to cut the trees but we have no choice," Diana Moono, a roadside charcoal seller, told me. The outrageous injustice of climate change can be understood when you consider that Zambia’s population of around 20 million people produce, in total, around 9 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, or less than one-sixth of the climate-destroying carbon pollution that Ireland’s five million people account for.

As politicians in the global north plan ever more draconian measures to prevent desperate migrants from reaching our shores, many of those same politicians, without apparent self-awareness, also oppose strong climate action. The refusal of rich countries like Ireland to act decisively on decarbon- ization and emissions reductions in line with the science may come to be seen as the ultimate own-goal, as climate-driven weather disasters and mass migration cause the international political and economic order to fray. Many of these risks were touched on in a report by the Irish Defence Forces in early 2025, which warned of widespread disruption to critical national infrastructure. In the report, Commandant Paul O’Callaghan warned that climate change ‘has become a tool for far-right extremists to amplify xenophobia, anti-globalism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, capitalizing on fears of migration, economic insecurity and resource scarcity’. What O’Callaghan described as a dangerous mix of ideolo- gies ‘requires close attention as both climate change and far-right extremism continue to shape global politics’.

At least for now, Ireland is not subject to the extreme droughts and heatwaves racking much of the European continent. This gives us precious time to adjust to the coming changes. Whether we use this opportunity to weatherize our society as far as possible and to engage in a rapid programme to achieve energy independence and domestic food security, or whether we squander it and continue to stumble forward blindly into an increasingly uncertain and dangerous future, remains to be seen; the evidence thus far suggests we remain firmly on the latter path, essentially trading present comfort for future safety.

What would have to happen for the climate crisis to become our single dominant social, political and media issue? Nobody knows for sure, but it’s likely to be pretty brutal. Since it hasn’t happened yet, it’s left to the creatives to try to imagine it. The opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry of the Future harrowingly chronicles a deadly heatwave in India in the near future that kills millions, an event that becomes the global catalyst for profound political, economic and social upheaval. Just such a catastrophe was narrowly avoided in 2022, and again in April 2025, when temperatures in densely populated regions of India and Pakistan edged close to levels that could trigger a mass fatality event as persistent power outages reduced public access to air conditioning.

‘We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.’ This was the sobering conclusion to the State of the Climate report, endorsed by more than 15,000 practising climate scientists and published in late 2024.38 Despite the warnings, humanity remains in thrall to what philosopher Roman Krznaric — author of books including History for Tomorrow and The Good Ancestor — described as ‘pathological short-termism’. We treat the future, he argued, ‘like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we dump our ecological degradation, risk, nuclear waste and public debt’.

Perhaps what Ireland needs is a real-life Ministry for the Future?

Sweden established just such a ministry in 2014, while the following year, our nearest neighbour, Wales, appointed a Future Generations Commissioner to help embed longer-term thinking into the political process.

The closest thing Ireland has managed to date has been the Citizens Assemblies, our hugely successful experiment in deliberative democracy. This revealed, on issues as diverse as climate change and abortion, an Irish public more progressive, kinder and more empathetic than most people had imagined.

The eyes of future generations are on this generation, silently urging us to act bravely and quickly on the climate emergency, to save them from an immiserated future in a collapsed biosphere. Will we rise to the moment and earn the right to be regarded as ‘good ancestors’

• This is an extract from The Lie of the Land: A Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis (Sandycove/Penguin Books), available now, by John Gibbons