Should a new dog shelter count as a climate action project?

Dublin City Council plans to spend €120,000 over the next three years to develop its proposal for a municipal dog shelter in Meakstown, says its capital programme.

A council-owned site has been eyed, close to the city boundary, it says. The funding would cover “preliminary appraisal of the merits and feasibility of the proposed project”.

The proposed project is also, the document shows, tagged as a climate action project.

As are almost all of the other projects in its capital programme – from road upkeep and the refurbishment of carriageways, to work on car parks, the reinterment of human remains from a crypt, and adding public toilets around the city.

Green Party Councillor Feljin Jose is sweary about this.

“Sure everything should be approached with a climate lens,” he says. “But you don’t take the entire budget of every programme and call it climate action investment.”

That obscures what climate action the council is taking, he said. “If the reporting process is murky like this. How do we keep track of what’s actually being done?”

Michelle Murphy, a research and policy analyst at Social Justice Ireland, says that it is good to see a council look at its budget with climate in mind. “It’s commendable, I really think, that they’ve done it at least.”

But, she says, “I certainly think what they do need is a bit more refinement.”

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said it is taking a systems approach to climate action rather than narrowly focusing on single actions to address single sources.

As an example, a narrow focus on EVs as a way to reduce transport emissions would ignore how improving road safety with speed enforcement can make walking and cycling more attractive, they said.

With the budget, officials “identified projects based on their potential to impact on our climate objectives directly and indirectly by applying a climate lens”, they said.

They asked whether it would mitigate emissions, reduce climate impacts such as heat risks and flooding, and whether it would contribute to a just transition, they said.

The dog shelter would be a new-build and so meet nearly zero energy building (NZEB) standards, they said.

Road upkeep is preventative, they said. It reduces “the risk of roads being flooded, washed out etc in an extreme weather event”. Work on city car parks includes EV charging and bike parking, they said.

The reinterment of remains from St Luke’s crypt is part of a larger redevelopment of the green space and church that is ongoing, they said.

Public toilets, meanwhile, are part of a reimagined public realm with less waste and pollution, they said. “Street cleaning has an environmental and climate cost.” /

Climate tagging

The current capital programme is the second one in which Dublin City Council has included climate-tagged projects.

The document gives a breakdown of how much of spending in each area of council responsibility is on climate-action related projects.

All of the spending on housing and building falls under climate action, it says.

All the spending under drainage and flood relief, development incentives, and environmental protection falls under climate action too, the document says.

Meanwhile, about 99 percent of the spending on culture and amenity, 98 percent of the spending on road transportation and safety, and 78 percent of the spending on “miscellaneous services” is climate action.

Dublin City Council is taking a “systems approach” to its climate action, said a written response to Jose, when he queried the breadth of projects tagged as climate action.

The four foundations in its climate action plan are to create: a resilient city, a resource-full city,  creative city and social city, it said.

Actions under these headers aim to further targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 51 percent by 2030, to make a resilient city that can prepare for the knowns and unknowns of climate change, and ensure a just transition.

Project managers chose if a project met one of those four foundations, said the response. The climate change office reviewed them to check, it says.

Getting on board

A big benefit of climate tagging for budgets is that it gets staff involved and builds capacity and changes culture, says Sébastien Postic, a project manager at the Institute for Climate Economics, a think tank based in Paris.

It gets people thinking, he says. “What’s the connection between climate longer term goals and every day?”

“That’s for like civil servants, that’s also for like city councillors. All the people that have a say in decisions basically and don’t make the link between the finance and the climate,” he says.

So far in Dublin, debate appears to have been mostly among council officials, rather than the councillors.

Council managers put together the capital programme, says Séamas McGrattan, a Sinn Féin councillor and chair of the Dublin City Council’s finance committee.

So his committee hasn’t talked about green budgeting or what is tagged as climate action, he said.

Another big goal is accountability, says Postic, of the Institute for Climate Economics, “Making sure that you are on track or on a par with your commitments.”

Murphy, the research and policy analyst at Social Justice Ireland, points to how work by the Parliamentary Budget Office allows that at a national level.

Its reports track climate spending and its approach allows for measurable outcomes, she says.

Its report for 2023 showed that climate-related spending was 4.5 percent of the gross voted spending. And, climate-related spending was more likely than other items to be unspent and carried over.

At local government level, “Scrutinising the performance of local authorities against priorities and targets set”, is among councillors’ responsibilities.

Jose, a Green Party councillor, says an inability to do this given the breadth of projects  is his main gripe. “This is too broad,” he said.

Ways to count

What is considered climate action can be complicated, says Murphy, of Social Justice Ireland.

Measures such as retrofitting social homes are simple to categorise, she says. That’s because they mitigate carbon emissions.

But others take more thought. Building new social homes might not be obvious as a climate action project, she says.

But “if the BER rating is an A or a B, then it is meeting a climate target”, she says, because they are energy efficient.

“That’s the challenge, it’s hard,” says Murphy.

Postic, at the Institute for Climate Economics, says that there are different ways to judge whether a project can be considered a climate action project.

Officials can look at intent, he says. “Okay, did I do it for climate? Was climate the side-effect or was it climate not at all?”

But that doesn’t help to understand the real-world impact, Postic says. “If you want to do that, you have to go a bit more in depth into what was the climate impact?”

He doesn’t mean as deep as to calculate the CO2 emissions avoided, he says. “That’s a long way to go.”

Rather, it means checking projects against the detailed goals in local strategies or climate action plans, Postic says.

It could be that it encourages private cars that emit below a certain threshold, as has been decided in your local strategy, he says.

In France, experts know how much renewable transport fuel the country can produce sustainably at the moment, he says. So, a certain number of buses and trains can run on it and no more.

If you made a commitment to run all buses on these and took that commitment out of context, you would look as if you are set to reduce emissions, he says. “But that would make the whole strategy unfeasible.”

Some of the projects tagged as climate action projects in the city’s capital budget do match the more detailed actions in Dublin’s climate action plan.

The climate action plan specifically mentions refurbishing the Mansion House. It is a public building regeneration project that will contribute to a more resilient city, it says.

“Our public buildings will demonstrate how heritage buildings can be adapted and retrofitted for a climate resilient future,” the plan says. “All retrofitting and maintenance works will prioritise energy efficiencies, segregated waste facilities, renewable energy generation […] and mobility options […]”.

But others, such as the dog shelter, aren’t mentioned, and fall more indirectly under the climate action plan’s four broad foundations.

Getting attention

One takeaway of Postic’s research is that green budgeting should consider taxes and levies, and the incentives that these create – as well as spending.

If something is flagged as having a negative impact on the climate that attracts attention, he says. “People start discussing, why are we doing it?”

“If something is measured, it’s generally considered,” says Murphy, of Social Justice Ireland.

There have been ad-hoc examples of this effect in Dublin.

In December 2022, Green Party councillors pushed for changes to development levies – the sums which developers building in the city pay to the council – arguing that they should be applied to car parking spaces.

There has also been a long-running debate among officials and councillors as to whether the city should have variable parking charges based on how polluting a vehicle is.

Those discussions don’t always lead to policy changes though.

Murphy focuses on the positives of climate tagging and the clarity this can bring around the impact of climate-related spending and climate action.

“I think being able to tangibly show, these are the benefits that are coming and you are going to be able to derive from it, on a year on year basis, makes people more open to things,” she says.