WATER DISASTER

70,000 homes could be submerged if more isn’t done on climate crisis

MORE than 70,000 Irish homes risk ending up underwater within the next three decades with the country “running out of time” to deal with the climate emergency.

A report from the IPCC was labelled as a “code red” by the Taoiseach as it warned the world will see temperatures rise by 2C by 2050, bringing sea levels up by around one metre globally.

And this fact has been driven home by Richard Cantwell, a senior spatial data scientist at Gamma Location Intelligence and one of the authors of a 2020 report which highlighted the huge danger.

According to their projections, the East coast is set to bear the brunt of the damage. Dublin will be the most affected county in terms of the number of addresses expected to be impacted by extreme coastal water levels, with 23,435 properties at risk. Louth (11,248) will be second most affected – but that results as 20% of residential addresses in the Wee County being at risk.

Speaking to the Irish Mirror, Mr Cantwell explained why those in the east have the most to fear.

He said: “It really comes down to the fact that the coast on the east is more low lying and there’s been a lot of buildings and homes sprout up there in recent years, whereas it’s more sparsely populated on the west. Storms are much more common in the west coast and people have historically avoided building there.

Mr Cantwell added the Government must do two things in order to prevent the damage from happening sooner than anticipated.

Mr Cantwell said: “There are two angles they can take – avoidance and mitigation. On the avoidance side, that’s down to minimising the amount of carbon that’s going into the atmosphere from Irish sources, be it energy sources or traffic or so on, but I think that’s well understood by the leaders and they’re taking that on board. How they execute it remains to be seen.

“On the mitigation side, there needs to be a discussion as to what central and local governments and communities can do in areas which are going to be impacted in the future.

“There are those out there who say that the properties at risk have to be defended, they are difficult conversations, they need to be had.”