How your county is weighing in on fighting climate change
As a nation obsessed with the weather, it’s tempting to focus only on the effects of climate change rather than causes, especially as storms, flooding and even drought become increasingly frequent and intense on our notoriously rainy island .
But climate change is not just about weather.
In 2024, each of the 31 local authorities in Ireland had to publish a five-year Climate Action Plan setting out how they would meet Ireland’s climate targets of halving emissions by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
In Weathering Change: Your County’s Climate Story, the Irish Independent examines the major climate risks facing each county, and assesses how the county and city councils are living up to their plans.
Our network of regional and local democracy reporters also zeroes in on the major issues and interesting climate change-related projects within each of the 26 counties, including the fight to install rock armour to stop coastal erosion threatening homes in Wexford, the rush to build large-scale solar farms in Cork, and a community resource centre in Monaghan giving local people the knowledge and skills to make their own impact.
This project outlines how authorities aim to reduce emissions, the major challenges they face and whether enough is being done to stave off an even bigger climate crisis should global temperatures soar past two, three or even four degrees of heating.
You can read about the project via each county in the map below, and can watch specially commissioned videos and listen to our podcast on the Irish Independent website.
Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service recently added 2025 to the top three hottest years since human records began. The other two were 2023 and 2024. In fact, the 11 warmest years on record have been the past 11 years.
As people continue polluting Earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gases, heat from the sun is trapped, causing global heating.
So far, it has resulted in an increased surface temperature about 1C above that in pre-industrial times, melting ice caps, sparking sea-level rise and producing a range of weather extremes that would have been far less likely had we left coal, oil, gas and turf in the ground.
Fossil fuels are responsible for the vast majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Agricultural systems are also a big contributor.
In Ireland, severe flooding is “the price we have to pay” for not controlling the crisis, according to Maynooth University professor John Sweeney.
The climate expert rarely misses a UN global climate conference. Each year, at the Conference of the Parties (or Cop, as we know it), world leaders and negotiating teams debate measures to try and drive down emissions.
Every state at these conferences must agree to each policy shift unanimously.
In 2015, Ireland was one of 187 parties that ratified the Paris Agreement to keep global heating well below 2C and, at Cop21, pursued efforts to limit it to 1.5C.
According to the IPCC, to deliver on that promise, global greenhouse gas emissions would have needed to peak before 2025, then fall 43pc by 2030 – compared to 2019 levels – and 60pc by 2035. But we are on track to fail.
Prof Sweeney, who was recently at Cop30 in Brazil, said “Cop has been disappointing since the Paris Agreement” because “national self interests have undermined [it] considerably”.
“The vacuum created by the absence of the US, divisions within the EU, the unwillingness of China to take leadership, all contributed to creating a vacuum which suited the petro states, who effectively then undermined the conference,” he added.
Despite limited global progress in December, Ireland still has European and national climate targets to meet – with the help of local authorities across the State.
Under the EU Effort Sharing Regulation, the State must cut greenhouse gases 42pc – compared to 2005 levels – by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. If we don’t, it could mean fines of up to €28bn.
We also have legally binding national targets, including a 51pc emissions reduction by 2030 – compared with 2018 – that amounts to a reduction of about 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).
In an attempt to deliver, the Oireachtas passed a series of climate laws and policies, including three carbon budgets to take us up to 2035 and emissions ceilings for sectors including agriculture, transport and energy.
Local authorities were asked to play their part with the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021, which mandated that they produce Climate Action Plans for the period between 2024 and 2029.
From Dublin’s four councils to rural Leitrim and coastal Sligo, every council faces unique challenges.
In Westmeath, for instance, an increasing chunk of electricity generation goes to energy-hungry data centres.
Heavily forested Leitrim suffers disproportionately when storms roar through, sending trees tumbling over power lines.
Seaside businesses in Sligo fear for the future as rising tides steal metres of coastline each year.
In councils’ action plans, the local authorities were required to detail how they would cut their own emissions 51pc in line with national targets and improve energy efficiency.
In Meath, councillors omitted the biggest emitters from the county’s Climate Action Plan, despite their planning powers.
In Kerry, the council neglected to outline the county’s total 2018 emissions in their action plan even though any future reductions would be measured against that baseline.
In spite of these omissions, most councils aim to achieve this through actions such as retrofitting public housing and council offices, and running greener vehicles.
The authorities are also expected to advocate for and facilitate the cutting of emissions by the wider community and businesses.
Realistically, that is the hard part of all this, given that local authorities’ emissions are typically a low single-digit percentage of emissions. Areas largely outside councils’ control – such as agriculture, transport, and domestic and commercial buildings – are the more significant producers of CO2e.
Aforementioned oversights aside, many plans were peppered with common-sense proposals to cut emissions inside and outside councils.
Carlow town has seriously ramped up its urban bus service – giving commuters and shoppers a reliable, realistic alternative to the car – and added a new hi-tech fire engine powered with lower-emission hydrotreated vegetable oil to the fleet.
In Kildare, the council teamed up with Maynooth University to retrofit a DemoHouse that would show people the benefits of switching from oil, gas or coal to heat pumps and solar panels, and the impact insulation, glazing and biodiversity-proofing your garden can have.
Monaghan, meanwhile, has a hub – Knocknagrave Environmental Centre – where they teach the local community how to play their part to stave off the worst of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.
But Prof Sweeney, who, through a committee, has worked with councils on plans for their decarbonising zones, said progress is slow.
“A lot of it depends on the vigour and the enthusiasm of the climate officer in each local authority,” he said.
“There’s a ‘passing the buck’ element, from the Department of the Environment down to local authorities, who are badly, badly underfunded and are more or less being told, ‘Get on with it’.”
Councils have been asked to cut their emissions in line with national targets, but they have little to no control over sectors like agriculture, which was the biggest climate polluter in many counties.
In relation to these sectors, the action plans focus on leading by example and opening a dialogue with communities.
Dr Cara Augustenborg, who led Environmental Protection Agency research on climate communications involving local authorities, said: “The three top challenges in climate communications for local authorities were translating complex data into easy information for different audiences with different levels of knowledge, chronic underfunding, and a lack of perceived relevance and urgency.”
Eoin O’Neill, director of the UCD Earth Institute, said: “It is great that we have local authorities pushing ahead to deliver climate action locally.”
Where the action plans fall short, Prof O’Neill believes, is on issues like “contaminated drinking water” from rural wells and septic tanks that service around 800,000 people and are also “vulnerable to climate impacts”.
“As these drinking water sources are unregulated, they tend to get limited attention,” he said. “I think local authorities could really help by bringing these types of issues together and making the case for targeted initiatives on the ground.”
Prof O’Neill pointed out that “the impact of increasingly violent storms” means we are “hearing more about emergency response”, and there are “plenty of references to flood relief schemes in the climate action plans”.
So, while climate change is not just about weather, much of the response to climate change by councils around the country deals with the effects of climate change, rather than tackling the causes.
Prof O’Neill said that, even though the councils have a new responsibility as a result of action plan commitments, they have staffing levels that still haven’t returned to what they were before the financial crisis.
“Securing additional funding to support priority initiatives will be key to seeing results,” he said, “as will improving data collection to enable prioritisation and to monitor whether local climate plans are delivering for people and the environment.”
Shauna Corr is an investigative reporter and UCD Earth Institute journalist-in-residence
Weathering Change: Your County’s Climate Story has been funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme