Paul Keenan
Cliona sharkey As Finola Finnan, Trócaire’s deputy executive director, and the body’s policy officer Cliona Sharkey sit down with The Irish Catholic on the fringes of the Laudato Si’ and Catholic Investing conference, there is time enough to celebrate recent developments back home of direct relevance to the Irish bishops’ aid and development agency.
Just before the journey to Rome, it was announced that the Dáil had passed the Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill to Committee stage, bringing the nation a step closer to withdrawing investments under the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) from fossil fuel companies and banning future investments in the industry by the Fund.
Worldwide ban
That Ireland could become the first country worldwide to ban such investment would be a proud achievement indeed. And if it ultimately becomes a reality, it will stand as the fruits of the labours Trócaire has been involved in for the past number of years.
The aid agency was directly involved in having the Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill drawn up and tabled before legislators.
Indeed, well before the then UN General Secretary Ban Ki moon said during a presentation in Dublin in 2015 “Today one cannot be a leader on hunger without also being a leader on climate change”, Trócaire was already linking the two as a direct result of what it was experiencing on the ground in its areas of operations across the developing world.
“The whole reason we are involved [on climate change] is through what we see in the countries we work in.”
It was through such direct experiences that Trócaire, in the wake of the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013, partnered with Maynooth University on a five-country study to look at the effects of climate change on human development. The report – ‘The Burning Question’ – found evidence that, among others, floods and storms affecting Honduras have increased in frequency; crop yields across sub-Saharan Africa are falling, with grim projections for the century ahead, resulting in crop revenues in the region falling by 90% by 2100. Projections for Kenya alone based on falling yields suggest a 3% annual loss of GDP to 2030.
Concern
Of more immediate concern, Finola says, is the fact that “10 million people in Africa are in need of aid through the impact of drought. That suffering is intensified by global warming.”
In the face of harsher realities and dire predictions, Finola details how Trócaire has responded through local partners by backing water management schemes and education around water ecology. In areas at particular risk, the agency has upped its backing for disaster response and equally for disaster preparedness. In the longer term, Trócaire is already pre-planning for developing nations to avoid the example set by more affluent by fossil-fuel dependent nations.
“Poor countries must be supported to develop low-carbon paths to avoid becoming trapped into carbon intensive energy infrastructure while the rest of the world transitions out of is,” the agency says. “[Thus] domestic and international policy must be designed to address poverty and environmental goals together in order to deliver just and lasting change.”
However, the same industrialised nations must recognise the part they play in either facilitating the growth of developing neighbours or stymying them through resistance to change. Returning to the themes visited in the conference, Finola warns “there is a point beyond which communities cannot adapt if the impacts [of climate change] are allowed to get worse”.
This is where Trócaire becomes active on the home front, continually pressing successive Irish governments on commitments on its EU commitments, but also helping to develop and support imaginative home-grown responses, such as the Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill. For Cliona, the local and international approaches are easily summed up. Ireland’s “development goals and environmental goals should be inextricably linked”.
And it should not be doubted that Ireland bears a critical responsibility in matters around climate change.
Quite aside from the example of the Keystone pipeline investment mentioned in the preceding pages, Trócaire points out that “The Irish population is small but greenhouse gas emissions per capita are among the highest among our industrialised peers. By comparison, the same emissions would be produced by around 400 million Africans.”
At the same time, laudable though the Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill is, Ireland is falling behind the pack of other nations in meeting its responsibilities on EU targets for greenhouse gas reduction by 2020 and beyond. (see: https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/energy-strategy – “By 2020, the EU aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20%, increase the share of renewable energy to at least 20% of consumption, and achieve energy savings of 20% or more. All EU countries must also achieve a 10% share of renewable energy in their transport sector.”)
Whatever about direct effects of climate change on this island nation and others by our behaviour, the agreements we have signed up to mean that continued failure to meet EU targets between 2020 and 2030 has the potential to cost us a minimum of €50million annually in fines and corrective measures.
As Cliona explains, this is the price we pay as an industrialised nation; now extrapolate that out to a developing nation forced to spend more and more of its scarce revenues on protective and preventative measures, leaving little or nothing for those investments necessary to break its cycle of poverty and join the wealthier nations of the world.
In this, Cliona continues, “Laudato Si’ has added so much to the conversation. It has brought thinkers together to the task, and from all faith traditions. It has opened up the conversation that needs to take place”.
Projecting just a short timespan ahead, Cliona suggests that by the time the Pope visits Ireland in 2018, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if dialogue [around Laudato Si’ and divestment] had been built in Ireland”.
Until then, Trócaire has pledged itself to giving a new voice to the developing nations it assists, one on climate change that more and more observers agree, must go hand in hand with poverty reduction. It would be a proud moment if that voice were heard first and loudest in Ireland.
As Finola puts it, so simply and succinctly, be it through the scale of our greenhouse gas emissions, or the legislation to make us a world leader in shifting from fossil fuel investment: “What we do in Ireland affects the developing world.”