Member's statement: Climate Change: Global Temperatures

Member's statement by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 14 January 2025.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

14 January 2025

Type

Member's statement

Business

Members' Statements

Heading

Climate Change: Global Temperatures

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4736159

Read the official Assembly record

Text

The year 2024 was the first in which the globe recorded a temperature rise of 1·5°C above pre-industrial levels. That number is an important one, but not in a good way. A decade ago, at COP21 in Paris, the major participant nations in that conference agreed to limit global temperature rises to below 1·5°C. For decades, that has been deemed to be a critical threshold that the world cannot cross. Recording one year's rise on that scale does not completely breach the barrier, because the 1·5°C threshold has to be recorded as a median over a number of years, but it shows that climate breakdown is happening faster and more aggressively than people thought in 2015 and than we have been planning for. It is frightening. It is chilling — no pun intended. We have seen the images from Los Angeles in recent days. This is January. Most of the wildfires that plague that part of the United States happen at the height of the summer, but, in January, those wildfires are raging. They have left dozens dead and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in one of the wealthiest and most affluent parts of the planet.

Last year, across the world, including in Spain and Mexico, we saw extreme weather events. We will keep seeing extreme weather events as climate change and breakdown bites. It is happening. Climate change is not deniable any more, nor is it something that we can simply put a stop on. We can mitigate it with our policy response, but we can also continue to work to limit it by moving towards net zero. Often, we in Northern Ireland have acted as though climate change is happening somewhere else and that we can continue living and acting as though it does not matter. Certainly, it took us a very long time in this place to adequately respond to climate change. I am pleased that we passed a Climate Change Act at the end of the previous mandate. We were the last jurisdiction in these islands to do so. We have been a laggard not just in dealing with climate but in environmental action and nature restoration more generally. In this mandate, or in what is left of it, we need to see those targets and plans put into meaningful action. We need the Executive to agree a climate action plan urgently. I commend genuinely the Environment Minister for bringing such a plan to the Executive, but we now need to see practical action. It is not just going to affect us all; it will completely transform the way that we live over the century. Let us be serious about it and start to deal with it in this jurisdiction.

455 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:47 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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