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We must get to grips with climate change – Sherlock

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Local TD Sean Sherlock this week urged the Government and all parties to get to grips with climate change, in interests of not just future generations but the ones present also.

“We must start to take radical action to ensure we have both an investment portfolio and a set of policy instruments that take seriously the risks inherent in climate change,” said Deputy Sherlock during the debate on the Petroleum & Other Minerals Development Climate Emergency Measures Bill. The Government was defeated on the vote and the bill will now proceed to Committee stage after the Labour Party backed the proposed legislation by Solidarity. The Bill seeks to ban fossil fuel exploration in Ireland.

“In this country we are now subject to greater weather events which have an impact on the delivery of food, how agriculture operates and on the built environment in the towns, villages and enclaves in which we live. We must start to take radical action to ensure we have both an investment portfolio and a set of policy instruments that take seriously the risks inherent in climate change. In Paris in December 2015, Ireland agreed to halt climate change. We signed up to very specific targets, namely, to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit that temperature increase to 1.5° Celsius. The time has come for us to be very serious about that target from a global perspective, particularly in regard to what we do on the island of Ireland.”

Deputy Sherlock also praised the work of Irish Aid but warned that Irish efforts abroad must be supported as part of a global target on climate change.

“Through Irish Aid, we support subsistence farming projects in the Tigray region of Ethiopia to allow a sustainable model of agriculture to exist there in order that people can feed themselves, at the very minimum. We have to make the connection between the programmes that we are supporting in sub-Saharan Africa and the effect of a global average temperature increase of 2° Celsius above the pre-industrial levels on the very people we are assisting. We in western Europe are contributing by our actions to that very same increase in temperatures.”

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