Mark Horton from The Rivers Trust tells us how there…
Ireland’s State of the Environment Report 2024
Progress, economic prosperity, and health are all threatened unless Ireland increases the scale, pace, and ambition of environmental action.
The EPA has published the 2024 State of the Environment Report. This report provides an integrated assessment of the overall quality of Ireland’s environment, the pressures being placed on it and current responses to environmental issues. This report, published every four years and the eighth in the series, covers climate change, air quality, noise, water quality (both inland and in the marine), land use, soil and nature.
3 October 2024: The EPA has published its flagship 2024 State of the Environment Report. The report illustrates that Ireland continues to play catch-up.
- Our reliance on landfills has reduced dramatically, but we are generating and exporting too much waste.
- We have made progress in improving air quality in our cities, but we have increasing evidence that even low levels of air pollution impacts our health.
- While we have addressed serious pollution in many rivers and lakes, we are not making progress on the more widespread water pollution from too much nutrient.
For too long, the Report says, we have merely aimed to ‘get by’ aspiring to only minimum standards, and then in many instances not even meeting those. The report shows that actions on multiple fronts to address issues are not keeping pace with growing pressures and our environment continues to degrade.
What is now needed, the report continues, is a strategic leap, a shared vision for how we will adapt our lives and work to protect our own existence within the next decade, and a national policy statement on the environment that articulates and drives this transition.
“We have made immense progress as a nation. Our membership of the EU helped us achieve that. We now look back to a time when we had serious industrial pollution of our rivers, when we relied on over a hundred municipal dumps, when we burned smoky fuel in our cities – and we can never go back to that.
“But where we are right now,” Ms Burke added, “while it is better, is nowhere near good enough. We are always playing catch-up. We now have virtually no seriously polluted rivers, but we have hardly any pristine ones left, either. We now recycle more, but produce more waste than ever and export much of it. We are taking positive actions across multiple fronts, but they are not keeping pace with the growing pressures, and our environment is being squeezed. Increments now are not best use of scarce time and resources: We need to make a fundamental shift.”
“We know what we have to do. Our energy, transport, food and industrial sectors are the core of where this transformation can, must, and will happen. We must harness all of our resources to meet this challenge. Not acting now only postpones inevitable change that will be much more difficult, and more costly, later on. We can no longer take the environment for granted. By taking determined actions, we will ensure we are not going to go back, or playing catch-up. This time, we need to be ahead. A healthier environment is attainable for all and is within our reach.”
Laura Burke, Director General of the EPA
That fundamental shift, according to the report, would start with a national policy position on the environment, that allows for long-term planning and would ensure that the environment is prioritised consistently across decades.
The report identifies five key essential areas we must prioritise to deliver the impact we need:
- We urgently need a national policy position on the environment.
- We must rigorously implement existing environmental plans and programmes to achieve the benefits that they were developed to deliver.
- We need to transform our energy, transport, food and industrial sectors.
- We need to scale up investment in water, energy, transport and waste management infrastructure.
- We need to understand the absolute link between protecting our environment and protecting our health – harm one and we harm the other.
“It is clear that our environmental challenges are interconnected and they are complex. We need to drive action across climate, biodiversity, sustainable consumption and pollution goals. This will not be easy and we cannot underestimate the challenges of moving to a path of a less wasteful, regenerative society. The IPCC has highlighted that there is now a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all. It is not negotiable. We need our air, water and natural environment to continue to prosper. You either change for the environment now or the environment will irrevocably change us and how we live later. We, in Ireland, must do our part in making this sustainable future a reality.”
Dr Micheál Lehane, EPA Director
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