Climate Action Plan 2026 delayed
Climate Action Plan 2026, which was initially due to be published in December 2025, will not be brought to the Cabinet until “later this year”, according to reports.
The Climate Action Plan, which was first published in 2019, sets out the State’s decarbonisation ambitions, while subsequent updates and legislation has set a decarbonisation target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent 2030, and then net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The plan operates within a framework of carbon budgets which sets emissions caps for the periods of 2021-2025, 2026-2030, and 2031-2035. However, the first two carbon budgets face significant overruns, and Minister Darragh O’Brien TD has also accepted that Ireland will not meet its 2030 targets under the Climate Action Plan.
This is not the first piece of significant policy to be delayed by government. The 2025 National Development Plan update and the Government’s successor housing strategy to Housing for All, Delivering Homes, Building Communities, were both delayed by several months.
Leading academics from Maynooth University, Dublin City University, University College Dublin, University College Cork, in a letter to the Minister, have argued that there has been “an extraordinary failure on climate action governance”.
They add: “The primary focus of CAP26 has to be on bringing forward new, additional and accelerated actions to deal with overruns in the current carbon budget. There is no sense in which such entirely parallel statutory processes of carbon budget adoption or revision must, or should, delay CAP26.”
In December 2025, eolas Magazine enquired to DCEE as to when CAP26 was set to be published. The Department responded with the following statement: “The latest Climate Action Plan was published in April 2025 and, taken with previous plans, contains a very significant national programme of measures capable of reducing emissions very significantly.
“The Climate Act sets down an obligation to prepare sectoral emissions ceilings for different sectors of the economy, within the limits of the relevant carbon budget. The next Climate Action Plan must be consistent with the carbon budget programme and address the first three carbon budgets in effect. It must set out detailed measures for 2026-2030 and pathways to 2040. Sectoral emissions ceilings must also be revised once a new carbon budget programme is adopted.
“The proposed second carbon budget programme (2031-2040) has recently been scrutinised in detail by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy. The committee’s engagement, and the contributions of the many experts who appeared before it, has been an important part of the technical and democratic oversight envisaged under the Climate Act. The report it published is extensive, and a testament to the hard work and effort the committee and its witnesses have put in. It has presented 38 comprehensive recommendations, spanning multiple sectors including electricity, transport, just transition, buildings, and agriculture and extends to policy areas beyond the proposals themselves.
“These wide-ranging recommendations will need to be carefully evaluated before the Minister brings any further proposals to government and that is what we are now focussing on, in addition to the work that has already been taking place over the course of the past few months. Once this work has been completed and the programme adopted, this will form the carbon budget framework under which the new plan will be delivered.”
In a subsequent statement to The Irish Times, the Department said that the 2026 plan needs to take account of the post-2030 period and the carbon budgets for this time period.
Although it has been reported that CAP26 will be published in April 2026, the Department’s statement says that although “work has commenced” in drafting the plan, there is only “a view to bringing a draft to government later this year”.
