Climate action: ‘People have to feel part of the solution, not the cause of the problem’

Alicia O’Sullivan, a third-year law student at University College Cork, represented Ireland at the first UN Youth Climate Summit in New York in 2019. She was also a delegate at the UN Climate Change conference in Glasgow in 2021. A former environmental officer at UCC, she is now involved in an international academic collaboration on mobility, sustainability and diversity.

“I think what’s missing from Government discussion on climate action and emissions cuts is the whole area of climate justice and how these changes will affect everyone in a different way. It is people who will have to make the change happen,” she says.

O’Sullivan believes that the actions required to meet our climate targets needs to be communicated to us similar to the daily news bulletins we got during the Covid pandemic. “The first five years to 2025 are the most important and if we don’t catch up now, we’ll never catch up yet climate action isn’t treated as an emergency in the way that Covid was or even the Ukrainian refugees have been. We were able to bring in emergency laws for Covid but I’ve been told that’s not possible for climate change policy,” she says.

Sometimes issues are only seen as the preserve of environmental groups or the Green Party but the challenge for us was to make fracking an issue for everyone in the community

—  Johnny Gogan

O’Sullivan believes that better communications about how we can meet our climate targets and the financing to support this will be the keys to success. “We were supported during Covid – both financially and through good communications. That’s what’s missing now and what is needed for a just transition.”

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Johnny Gogan, film-maker

Johnny Gogan is a film-maker, novelist and environmental activist who, through the Love Leitrim campaign group, was heavily involved in the national effort to have fracking banned in Ireland in 2017.

“We need a stronger bottom-up response to climate action so communities can become more central to the solution,” says Gogan. He says policymakers have known about the need to act on climate change since the 1970s but were “completely captured by vested interests of the fossil fuel industry and the construction, transport and farming sectors”. Now that we have a whole-of-government approach to tackling climate change, he believes policymakers [in the public service] have caught up.

He says working towards consensus and involving everyone in the community in a non-confrontational way was central to the success of the Love Leitrim campaign group. “Sometimes issues are only seen as the preserve of environmental groups or the Green Party but the challenge for us was to make fracking an issue for everyone in the community. We brought in politicians of all persuasions and farmers, fishing communities, musicians and artists all energised our campaign and reaffirmed the community,” he says.

Renewable energy and electric cars are part of the answer but we need a wider discussion on values within civil society to bring about a social transformation

—  Peadar Kirby

Now for Ireland to reach its emissions targets, Gogan believes that community approach is needed again. “We need to engage schools and sporting bodies to get involved in promoting active travel. People are waiting to be told what to do. We need a strong sense of active citizenship to deal with climate change, which is the big issue of our century. People have to feel part of the solution rather than the cause of the problem.”

Gogan says he is optimistic that the Government now sees the scale of the problem. “We have the necessary momentum but I’m pessimistic when I see the problems caused by climate change happening in front of our eyes.”

Peadar Kirby, professor

Peadar Kirby is professor emeritus of international politics and public policy at the University of Limerick, a social activist and a resident of the eco-village in Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary.

Kirby believes there has been too much emphasis on the technological solutions to climate change. “Renewable energy and electric cars are part of the answer but we need a wider discussion on values within civil society to bring about a social transformation,” he says. He believes there are lessons we can learn from how we responded to the Covid pandemic in the early months. “Community mattered. We relied on each other more than we did on technology and money. Working from home could also be transformative for climate change. As we’ve moved out of the pandemic, there has been a desire to return to normality – the intensification of consumerism and travel – but the deeper seeds have been sown that will come to the fore again,” he says.

If food waste was a country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the United States

—  Angela Ruttledge

Kirby suggests that the Cloughjordan eco-village experiment is a useful model. “The food crisis, inflation and the cost-of-living crisis will force us to face up to issues. I often feel very lucky to live in an eco-village where our homes are heated by renewable energy and we have a farm where 50 varieties of fruit, vegetables and herbs grow. If every community put those elements in place, we would be more resilient.” He bemoans the fact that there are so few community-supported agriculture and community-supported energy schemes in this country.

And while he is optimistic about the whole-of-government approach to tacking climate change, he believes there is a need for both the top-down and bottom-up approach to dealing with it. “The leaders of the political parties [Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party] in Government personally get it now although I’m not at all sure that the main opposition party [Sinn Féin] gets it. We need much stronger bonds of interdependence to weather the storms of climate change and to build flourishing communities again,” he adds.

Angela Ruttledge, restaurateur

Angela Ruttledge is a Dublin-based restaurant owner and was campaign lead for the Sick of Plastic campaign at the environmental non-governmental organisation Voice and is just about to start a new role as Public Affairs and Stakeholder Manager at Food Cloud.

“Working in the food industry has driven my interest in sustainability. I’ve been a vegetarian for a long time and I used to think, I’ll do this myself and I don’t care about other people eating meat but maybe we should be moving to an agricultural system that reflects what is healthiest to eat.”

“Then I became obsessed about food waste, excessive packaging on food and what goes on behind the scenes in the food industry,” she explains.

We need to turn climate approaches on their head. There has been so much emphasis on policy, finance and economic incentives but, for change to happen, it has to be done with people not to people

—  Amanda Slevin

While Ruttledge campaigned to introduce the so-called Latte Levy (a customer charge on each single-use cup used when buying tea/coffee), she believes that food waste all along the food chain is the bigger issue to tackle. “If food waste was a country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the United States,” she says. She is inspired by initiatives in France such as the obligation on fast food chains to have reusables for sit-in eating, the requirement for water refill stations in larger shops and the ban on plastic packaging for many fruit and vegetables.

Ruttledge believes that strong policy and legislation (the Circular Economy Act was passed into legislation in July 2022) and more public awareness campaigns will be needed on food waste which accounts for about 6 per cent of our annual emissions. “The scale of the problem hasn’t hit home with lots of individuals. Hospital waiting lists and the housing crisis are the big issues on the doorsteps but climate change needs to be on the agenda so that we can support our politicians to lead the changes needed. Reducing food waste is linked to other issues of inflation, cost of living and energy,” she says.

Amanda Slevin, social scientist

Amanda Slevin is an environmental social scientist at Queen’s University Belfast who worked on Northern Ireland’s Climate Change Bill and the Belfast Low Carbon Road Map. She is also the director of Gaia research educational training.

Slevin believes that we need to have a socio-ecological imagination and a “community of communities” so that people can actively be involved in sustainable travel, energy-efficient housing and maintaining local green spaces. “We need to turn climate approaches on their head. There has been so much emphasis on policy, finance and economic incentives but, for change to happen, it has to be done with people not to people,” says Slevin. “To understand the enormity of the climate and ecological crises, we have to create opportunities for people to take action.”

Arguably, this has already started to happen with grants for electric cars and retrofitting and the development of sustainable energy communities and to a lesser extent eco villages but Slevin believes more bottom-up approaches are needed. She is impressed how Scotland has embedded “just transition” principles into its climate action. She also thinks there are opportunities for cross-Border communities from her involvement with the Shared Island dialogues run by the Department of the Taoiseach. “Nature doesn’t know borders. We need all-Ireland approaches and we need strong, healthy communities to become a strong, healthy society,” says Slevin, who volunteers at her local community garden in Letterkenny, Co Donegal.