Ireland must prepare for 2°C warming while pushing global climate action

The climate conference that wrapped up in Egypt last weekend was supposed to be a turning point. Nearly two hundred governments gathered to hammer out a deal on the one thing that might still save us from the worst of what's coming. They failed. There was no agreement to hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees by 2050. The reasons are not mysterious: countries like Saudi Arabia face the prospect of losing enormous wealth if the world stops burning fossil fuels, and that kind of money talks louder than the abstract threat of a warming planet.

What emerged instead was a modest commitment from richer nations to fund climate adaptation in poorer ones—a consolation prize that acknowledges the damage is already baked in. Without urgent action from the world's major economies, the temperature will rise well beyond 1.5 degrees. It could easily exceed two degrees. For a small island nation like Ireland, this is not an academic concern. It is a question of survival.

The science is unambiguous about what happens as temperatures climb past 1.5 degrees: things deteriorate rapidly. If the warming triggers the melting of ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic, sea levels will rise dramatically. For Ireland, that means the flooding of Dublin, Cork, Galway, and Limerick—not someday, but within the lifetime of people already born. The infrastructure that keeps these cities dry does not yet exist. Planning for it needs to begin now, not after the first catastrophe.

London offers a cautionary tale and a template. The Thames Barrier, conceived in the 1970s and completed in the 1980s, was built to protect the city from storm surge and rising water. It has been closed more than two hundred times since then, each closure a moment when London was spared from drowning. The barrier works. But even London's defenses are becoming inadequate as the climate shifts. If London needs an upgrade, Dublin needs to start from scratch.

The Netherlands has been building defenses against rising water for centuries. They have learned what works and what does not. Ireland should study that experience closely, because the cost of building protection now is almost certainly less than the cost of rebuilding cities after they flood. This is not pessimism dressed as prudence—it is the logic of insurance. You pay a premium to avoid catastrophe. The premium here is investment in infrastructure, and it needs to be authorized and begun soon.

But Ireland cannot solve this alone. The real leverage lies in what Europe does next. The continent should pursue three strategies simultaneously. First, invest heavily in the technologies that make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels. China is already the world's largest investor in renewables, and the United States has committed substantial resources to the same goal. If clean energy becomes the economically rational choice, market forces will do what treaties cannot.

Second, Europe must make fossil fuels expensive at home. Ireland is already committed to this approach, but pricing carbon is only the beginning. The burden of transition will fall hardest on low-income families, and the state will need to fund much of the adjustment. Third, and perhaps most important, the European Union should impose a tax on imports of carbon-intensive goods from countries that do not price their own emissions. Without such a tax, dirty industry simply moves offshore and stays dirty. With it, countries that want to sell into European markets will have to clean up how they produce. Since Ireland imports goods with high carbon content, such a policy would reduce the nation's carbon footprint while creating pressure for global change.

The world failed at COP27 to agree on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. That failure makes two things necessary: Ireland must prepare its cities for a warmer world, and Europe must use every tool at its disposal to push the rest of the planet toward decarbonization. Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. And do not wait.