The Government has legislated for fast-tracking large public infrastructure projects as “critical infrastructure”. This means that the public sector is required to speed up and prioritise their delivery. Meanwhile, nature provides critical infrastructure, often for free and at scale, but we do not make the right investments to ensure that the natural infrastructure that provides us with clean water, climate regulation and healthy food is adequately supported.
The nine nominated projects have been chosen across water, transport and energy. Some of these initiatives are undoubtedly needed to tackle persistent problems with water quality, the need to upgrade the national grid to cope with higher electricity demand and the incorporation of renewable energy sources, and the need to scale up low emissions public transport systems.
However, there is no obligation on the Government to nominate only projects that are environmentally beneficial as critical infrastructure. Indeed, the legislation explicitly disapplies section 15 of the Climate Act. Disapplying section 15 removes an obligation on the public sector to act in a way consistent with national climate objectives and action plans.
Imagine if we could build a large infrastructure project that would suck carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away, reducing the impact of climate change and the dangerous heatwaves and floods that it causes. A Government might designate that as critical infrastructure, because our lives and livelihoods depend on a liveable climate. Billions might then be spent on designing and building this carbon removal infrastructure.
A more enlightened Government might realise that investment in restoring the natural ecosystems that provide carbon removal and storage – our forests, bogs, salt marshes and grasslands – would be more cost-effective than the built solution and provide multiple other benefits such as clean water, flood mitigation and healthy soils.
The need to comply with national climate objectives and other environmental legislation is often set up as a blocker of infrastructure projects. We need to change the way we think about a healthy environment which is critical for the survival of our communities, economy and way of life. Which areas of the country and which ecosystems would we prioritise for restoration and protection if we thought about the really critical natural infrastructure our lives and the economy rely on?
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The art installation A Fine Balance, by Aoife Banville in collaboration with researchers from the Co-Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Water, questions how we value nature, investment and return, and how private finance and public investment can be mobilised to protect and restore it.
There are many valid arguments for protecting and restoring nature, from the “deep green” arguments that biodiversity has intrinsic value through to utilitarian arguments that intact healthy ecosystems provide us with critical ecosystem goods and services that would be impossible, unfeasible or wildly expensive to replace with built infrastructure and technology.
As we move into a period of human existence where we have caused the very climate that has enabled us to live and evolve on this planet to change in ways that threaten the stability of our economies and societies, we need to get real about the necessity for prioritising nature as critical infrastructure.
Nature does not hold all the solutions to our many and varied challenges, and we will still need renewable energy infrastructure, water treatment plants, reliable public transport and many other built infrastructure facilities. However, positioning our obligations to protect and restore nature as a blocker of economic development neglects our utter dependence on healthy functional ecosystems.
The Government’s Land Use Review process has outlined many of the challenges involved in providing for a sustainable future. The resulting report, A Living Land, recommends the development of a governance framework to “optimise use of land to meet a variety of societal needs including socio-economic, restoring nature, improving water quality, enhancing climate adaptation and mitigation”.
However, the Government response to this recommendation lacks the urgency that has been brought to bear on fast-tracking built infrastructure.
Land-based ecosystems are the critical natural infrastructure we need for effectively delivering a good quality of life in an increasingly turbulent future. It is time to speed up and prioritise the delivery of critical natural infrastructure through strategic protection and restoration actions.
Prof Yvonne Buckley is codirector of the Co-Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Water and is professor of zoology at Trinity College Dublin
