Linking the Irish Environment
Promoting all-island cooperation to respond to shared environmental challenges, risks, and opportunities.
Project Aims
EJNI is working with the Irish Environmental Network (IEN) and the Northern Ireland Environment Link (NIEL) to promote sustained cooperation across the island of Ireland to address shared environmental challenges. The 2023 Linking the Irish Environment Report sets out the key challenges to cooperation on the island and explores how these challenges can be mitigated and overcome.
Priorities going forward include continued monitoring of post-Brexit divergence, promoting cooperation in new areas, protecting and enhancing existing cooperation and ensuring that the potential of the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement to promote environmental cooperation on the island of Ireland is maximised.
Governance
Monitoring current environmental regulatory and governance arrangements on the island – especially those that have emerged post-Brexit and how these will impact or shape future cooperation.
Cooperation
Tracking and documenting the experience of environmental cooperation across the island of Ireland in practice.
Advocacy
Exploring mechanisms and advocacy priorities which can be used or developed to advance citizens’ and NGO engagement in all-island environmental issues.
Latest activity
Monitoring post-Brexit environmental divergence on the island of Ireland: The role of civil society
Demystifying post-Brexit environmental cooperation on the island of Ireland
Recording: Monitoring post-Brexit environmental divergence on the Island of Ireland: The role of civil society
Linking the Irish Environment: Exploring the role of civil society in promoting cross-border environmental cooperation
Linking the Irish Environment: Final Report
Linking the Irish Environment NI Update
Linking the Irish Environment was launched at a special seminar event in Belfast in June 2023 to mark and discuss 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement/Belfast Agreement and the challenges and solutions to protecting the all-island environment. Expert panelists and the authors were joined by special guest speaker Stewart Maginnis, the Deputy Director General at IUCN, International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Despite political arrangements, there are no borders in nature, and what happens in the
environment of one jurisdiction unavoidably impacts the other. The only way to preserve
the environmental integrity of both Northern Ireland and Ireland is through a coherent
system of environmental management.
One of the key recommendations from the Linking the Irish Environment Report was to establish an All Island Civil Society Forum on the Environment. IEN and NIEL successfully established this forum which ran throughout 2024. EJNI’s Dr Ciara Brennan addressed the final session of the forum in December 2024, highlighting the key findings of the Linking the Irish Environment Report and emerging challenges and opportunities.
Dr Ciara Brennan spoke to the Guardian about the grossly degraded state of the environment in Northern Ireland in January 2024, “The crisis at Lough Neagh is symptomatic of how bad things are across the north.” Highlighting that governance reform was overdue and urgently required to ensure proper enforcement of environmental law. Regarding the question of divergence in standards between NI and other parts of the UK and Ireland, she noted that “if you don’t have the governance structures in place to implement environmental law then it doesn’t really matter what the law is.”
