Living Lightly on Our Planet: Challenges for Ireland Peadar Kirby (bio) At the time of writing this article in the autumn of 2022, a slew of authoritative reports and studies underline the extremely precarious nature of the current situation facing humanity and the other species with which we share this beautiful planet. To take a few examples: • The UN Emissions Gap Report showed that updated national emission-reduction pledges since the Glasgow climate summit in late 2021 make a negligible difference to predicted 2030 emissions and that we are far from the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.1 • The State of Climate Action 2022 report from the World Resources Institute assesses progress towards forty indicators of system change to meeting climate goals and finds that none are on track to reach their 2030 targets.2 • The Living Planet Report 2022 from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) reports ‘an average 69% decline in the relative abundance of monitored wildlife populations around the world between 1970 and 2018’.3 • The United in Science Report from the World Meteorological Organization warns that we are entering an ‘unchartered territory of destruction’ as the climate warms and we risk provoking tipping points that will result in more rapid and perhaps irreversible shifts.4 • A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August sounded a warning that the risk of ‘worldwide societal collapse or even human extinction … is a dangerously underexplored topic’ and the scientists involved called on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to produce a special report on the issue.5 • The three volumes of the sixth assessment report of the IPCC, published in 2021 and 2022, showed that the negative impacts of climate change are happening much faster than scientists predicted less than a decade earlier and that a compete restructuring of the global economy is required. 6 When considering the topic of sustainability, which is what I was asked to address in my talk to the Royal Irish Academy in May 2022 on which this article is based, one cannot avoid the overwhelming evidence that the [End Page 43] world is on a completely unsustainable trajectory. In fact, so stark is the evidence that the term ‘sustainability’ itself requires critical attention since its widespread use seems to obfuscate rather than clarify the realities of where we find ourselves. This article therefore begins by interrogating the term ‘sustainability’ before examining whether Ireland is moving in the direction of greater or less sustainability. Subsequent sections discuss what is required to build greater sustainability, including development models, paradigm change, reversing inequality, the issue of degrowth, and community-led innovation. The conclusion briefly discusses the implications of this analysis for Ireland in 2030. I. Sustainability: what does it mean? In her inspiring public lecture to the Ireland Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Belfast last August, Quaker illustrator, editor, and environmental consultant Lynn Finnegan acknowledged that sustainability is still the most used term for the ecological challenge we face but added: ‘I don’t want to be sustainable. “Able to sustain”: it feels mediocre and not exciting, and not at all representative of what the [environmental] movement feels like.’7 This is an unusually frank challenge to a term that is both ubiquitous but also dangerously misleading. Some of the difficulty lies in ambiguities that are embedded in the term’s definition. For example, the Oxford Dictionary of English offers two definitions: ‘the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level’ and ‘avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance’. Among the dictionary’s examples of the former is ‘the sustainability of economic growth’, which illustrates the fact that the term ‘sustainability’ can be used to refer to a reality, economic growth, which is seen by many experts as one of the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions and the depletion of natural resources, two major constituents of unsustainability. In his history of sustainability, Caradonna defines the verb ‘to sustain’ as meaning ‘to maintain’, ‘support’, ‘endure’, or even ‘to restrain’ and says that the corresponding noun entered English in the 1970s. He acknowledges that...