FAQ 17: How to ‘save ourselves’ from future flooding by changing ourselves at the same time

Recent flooding across the country has put climate change at the front of many people’s minds this month. We’re lucky to have gotten away with ignoring the climate crisis as long as we did. While many countries have been experiencing the devastating impacts of climate change for years, Ireland has gone relatively unscathed so far. We haven’t suffered hurricanes like those in the USA or Philippines; droughts like those in Syria or California; or sea level rise like that of the Maldives or Florida. 

Jan. 2016 Independent.ie

We joke that we could do with some global warming around here and hope that climate change means we might get a decent summer someday. Last month, we ranked environment, climate and energy as the least important issue facing our country, even less than terrorism, in an EU-wide poll.
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How differently would we respond to that poll today after witnessing places like Kilkenny, Carrick, and Clonmel drowning in flood waters? We’ve designed our towns and cities to function within a narrow environmental envelope. When that environment fails us, it impacts everything about the way we live and work. 

January 2016 (mirror.ie)

Record-breaking rainfall demonstrates how our warming climate is intensifying the water cycle and putting us at greater risk of storms and floods.  Risk of extreme storms on the West coast of Ireland is now up 25% due to climate change.  Over 260 homes were flooded this week and will continually be at risk as the climate continues to warm and more water vapour enters the atmosphere. Combine this with the thousands of homes and businesses that are at risk due to sea level rise in Ireland and you see that we have a new kind of housing crisis on our hands, one due to climate displacement. 
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The penny seemed to have dropped with our politicians this week as they reassured us that they were working hard to address present and future flooding. Enda Kenny even proposed the idea of relocating those who live in high risk flooding areas (though many of those areas shouldn’t have been allowed to be developed in the first place). It seems our leadership has no problem spending money on adapting to climate change despite being totally averse to trying to prevent it (or mitigate).
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Enda Kenny (IrishTimes.ie)

Here’s the problem with focusing solely on climate change adaptation: First, it costs a lot more to adapt than to mitigate. Economists can't even estimate how much the damage and adaptation to climate change will cost if we fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Just this week, a study in Nature demonstrated that crop yields already decreased 10% from 1964-2007 as a result of droughts and extreme heat – and that’s only two of the hundreds of climate-related impacts that will intensify on our warming planet. The Stern review has shown that the benefits of strong, early action to address climate change considerably outweigh the costs of doing so.
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Secondly, we can’t easily adapt to 3-5 degrees Celsius of global warming, which is where we’re headed if we do nothing to reduce emissions. A 2007-2013 EPA report on climate adaptation demonstrated that we have barely scratched the surface in systematically addressing all the climate risks we might need to adapt to. These include risks to water (supply, quality & management); planning; and critical infrastructure, and that’s just domestic adaptation. How do we adapt to the global impacts of climate change when we’re so reliant on imported energy and food? 
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But I know our ministers have a simplistic answer as to why they happily agree to spend money on climate adaptation and not mitigation: They’ll say it’s because we’re not the USA, China or India and so “we didn’t start the fire” and can only adapt to the damage these larger countries have inflicted on us. By volume, our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are a blip on the radar compared to other countries, but our politicians turn a blind eye to our per capita greenhouse gas contributions, which are among the highest in Europe and the world.

Furthermore, the reason places like China and India have such high emissions is because of the goods we buy from them, not because their lifestyles are so carbon intensive (far from it). If everyone in China or India lived the way we do in Ireland, their emissions would be at five and 14 times larger, respectively, than they are today. Based on our individual lifestyles, there’s no doubt that we helped start this fire and can’t expect other countries to shoulder more of the responsibility in quenching it. 
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At last month’s United Nations’ climate negotiations, Enda Kenny made it clear to Irish Journalists that he had no intention of doing anything to address climate change if it impacted our economic recovery. Fortunately, the rest of the world didn’t hold the same out-dated views and the Paris Climate Agreement was approved. Now mother nature has given An Taoiseach a taste of what our country might be like should everyone adopt his self-serving attitude to the problem.
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It’s ironic to watch Fine Gael undeservedly blaming the EU this week for not being able to undertake flood prevention measures when they’ve expended so much of their political capital in Brussels on trying to get out of doing anything to address climate change based on ‘special case’ arguments. 
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This week, Ministers like Alan Kelly and Simon Harris jumped on the climate band wagon, stating we can expect to see more flooding as a result of climate change and we need to start spending money on adaptation and flood prevention. And for once in my life, I agree with them to some degree.  Adaptation is the only available response for the climate impacts that will occur before mitigation measures can have an effect, and flooding is one of those impacts. But as the Earth’s temperature rises, so too will the cost of adaptation and residual damages will remain inevitable. 
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Alan Kelly (Labour), RTE.ie

Part of saving ourselves from future flooding means changing ourselves at the same time by reducing Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement and the rest of the world. This week, mother nature reminded us that if our politicians are really concerned about floods and climate change, they need to take real action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or we need to vote elsewhere.   
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Keep Fighting the Good Fight!
-Cara

Watch: EcoEye on RTE1 Tuesday, January 11th at 7pm 
'Our Global Community' episode, featuring many of the Irish activists who attended COP21 in Paris. 

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