Latest Laois News: Local Minister says Climate Action a requirement to prevent bleak future

Climate Action Required to Prevent a Bleak Future, says Senator Pippa Hackett

“We are obliged to clean our water and our air, protect habitats, and meet our climate targets” Senator Hackett

Without climate action, we are committing our children and grandchildren, to a bleak future, according to Senator Pippa Hackett.

She was speaking on the Climate Action Bill in the Seanad, after the bill was passed in Dáil Eireann by 129 votes to 10.

But she added that a just transition is required for those who find themselves affected by the actions required to mitigate climate change.

“In my own area of the Midlands, we have many people whose livelihoods have been linked to peat extraction.  For generations, it was the central activity in the area, but now we understand the huge damage such extraction has done to our atmosphere,” she said.

“We also have many whose livelihoods are impacted by flooding.  Once upon a time such flooding was a one-hundred-year occurrence.  Now it occurs several times a decade. We cannot turn our backs on these lives, these people, these situations.”

Senator Hackett, who is Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, added that farming must work within the ecological limits by which it is bound.

“We are not obliged to feed 40 or 50 million people, but we are obliged to clean our water and our air, protect habitats, and meet our climate targets,” she said.