Carlow County Council’s plan for tackling climate change will be put to local councillors today.
The document outlines the problems that are facing the local authority because of climate change and the steps that they’re going to take.
Speaking to KCLR News, senior engineer in the Environment Section, Brian O’Donovan says there’s a range of measures proposed noting “We’ve very technical changes in terms of, you know, if you look at the planning side we’re looking at where we locate buildings whether that’s our own buildings or through our planning process, in terms of our housing stock how we build the housing stock that are more conscious of the climate change issues making sure that we’d use near zero energy buildings, very very practical things, single use plastics, increasing recycling, the use of electrical vehicles within our business here in Carlow”.
Mr O’Donovan adds that the increase in extreme weather events has been noticeable pointing out “We would expect a storm every couple of years, now we’re getting three, four or five storms every season and the intensity of those storms are fairly ferocious, we had one there even last week which was kind of the end of the normal storm season but you know we have the likes of hurricanes coming through with Ophelia a few years ago, these were nearly once in a decade events now they’re nearly once in a year events, certainly in terms of our resources that is causing an effect on our staff and the response that we have to give”.
