It has been a heart-breaking few days witnessing the devastation being visited on Midleton and other parts of Cork and West Waterford, due to the flooding from Storm Babet.
The personal testimonies, photos, and videos that have been shared across different media and social media channels bring home to us very vividly the distressing and destructive impacts of climate change on families, businesses, and communities.
The short-term responses are currently being developed and delivered.
Funds are being made available and mechanisms to distribute those funds are being developed, building on our previous experience in dealing with the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events.
We should also be mindful of the need for medium- to long-term responses.
The root cause of the increased occurrence and severity of extreme weather events is climate change.
As a society, we have known about this problem for many years and sadly, and to our shame, we have been negligent in responding to it.
While we have known about climate change for a long time, we are increasingly witnessing and experiencing the visible manifestations of it like never before.
Internationally, we have witnessed in the past few years significantly more heatwaves, droughts, flooding, forest fires, and many other manifestations of climate change.
We have been relatively sheltered in Ireland compared to other countries. This does not take away from the devastation felt by those who have borne the brunt of extreme weather.
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