The Green Party has described this morning's climate change report from the IPCC as a "call to action".
The IPCC climate report says scientists are 95 per cent certain that humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming, adding that a “pause in warming over the past 15 years is too short to reflect long-term trends”.
Speaking at the launch of his party's pre-budget submission in Dublin, environment spokesman Cllr Malcolm Noonan said the Government needed to take the lead with climate laws with binding targets.
He said current Government proposals on climate change had been “very much watered down” from those proposed when the Greens were in power.
“If the Government is to show leadership on the issue it should do so using the network of local authorities as agents for change, leading communities into this call for action,” he said.
“The report is quite clear that the emissions over the past 50 or 60 years are human induced and that we are experiencing significant warming over the last number of decades,” Mr Noonan said.
“The challenge for us all is to make the climate challenge a tangible one for people and for communities and I think that’s where people see a disconnect.
“ They see these reports coming out intermittently and they don’t see how it interacts with their daily lives but there’s a great opportunity to do that through giving local authorities the ability to drive the change with retrofit programmes, with community action schemes and through local government reform,” he said.
As part of its pre-budget submission, the party called for the carbon levy to be increased by €5 per tonne to €25 per tonne.