Looking back at 2020

July 5, 2021

ActionAid Ireland is please to share its 2020 Annual Report. The report highlights some of the important work achieved in 2020, despite unprecedented circumstances.

Read the report here.

A challenging year

The year was a challenging one across the globe. CEO of ActionAid Ireland, Siobhan McGee, writes in the report: “The onset of the pandemic exacerbated many of the inequalities we have worked long to address – schools closed in lower income countries, girls and boys lost their hard won right to an education; incidences of early marriage rapidly grew for teenage girls as families faced harsh economic conditions and reports of increasing gender-based violence. The poorest countries could not fall back on social protection when their incomes were cut off in an instant in March 2020, catapulting families into extreme stress. For many, this was on top of already difficult conditions – the effects of climate change, reduced agricultural productivity and food shortages, and for some, ongoing conflict.”

Income and expenditure

However, despite the challenging circumstances, our work continued. In 2020 ActionAid Ireland raised Income of €2,972,999. We raised this through individual support and the support of Irish Aid, Department of Foreign Affairs.

Total expenditure was €2,779,662. Of that, we spent 80% on charitable activities. We spent the remaining 20% on raising funds and on governance.

Highlights

Thanks to our supporters, we derestricted child sponsorship income in 2020. As a result, communities had the funds to respond to urgent needs due to the Coronavirus pandemic. In addition, Irish Aid kindly allowed us flexibility to allocate 50% of their funding towards our local response to the Coronavirus pandemic. This helped vulnerable families to meet their basic needs as well as continuing our programme work. We also supported the urgent international humanitarian response in Lebanon and Palestine due to the pandemic. Despite the challenging year, we also published a field guide on Behaviour Change to support other organisations to adopt a behaviour change approach. In addition, 10,700 people signed our petition to end FGM in Ireland. We were also nominated for a digital innovation award and an award for governance improvement. Around the world ActionAid reached 25million people.

Thank you

None of this would be possible without public and government support. Anna Lee, the Chair of ActionAid Ireland’s voluntary board of Directors writes in the report: “On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank all our individual and institutional supporters, and to our skilled and committed staff – together they are key to the effective realisation of our vision and mission.”

Launching the 2020 Annual Report

And so, to celebrate the launch of the report and to discuss in more detail our work in 2020, we will hold a short event at 5.30pm on Tuesday 13th July over Zoom.

Speakers on the day will include:

Anna Lee, Chair of the ActionAid Ireland Board, will host the event. She will also reflect on the work carried out in 2020.
James Foley, Treasurer of the ActionAid Ireland Board, will talk about his voluntary role on the Board. He will also give his highlights from the 2020 Annual Report.
Caroline Nkirote, Proposal Development Officer with ActionAid Ireland, will discuss how we adapted our plans for the Women’s Rights Programme, funded by Irish Aid, in order to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Siobhán McGee, CEO of ActionAid Ireland, will reflect on 2020. She will also reflect on her role as CEO over the last six years.

This event is an opportunity to ask us anything about our work, its impact on ending poverty, and how it is funded.

Image caption: 35 years old Sahan is one of the participants of an awareness programme conducted by ActionAid. She lives in Cox’s Bazar Rohingya Refugee Camp, Bangladesh. Photo taken by: Fabeha Monir/ActionAid

Protestors at COP 28 in Dubai. Photo: Konrad Skotnicki.

Belfast Climate Change March, 2019. Photo: Trócaire.

The Profit Driving the Crisis

Despite their overwhelming contribution to global emissions, fossil fuel companies continue to attract significant financial backing—driven by their enduring profitability. This is starkly illustrated by the case of ExxonMobil, the top fossil fuel investment held by asset managers based in Ireland. In 2023, ExxonMobil reported €33.63 billion ($36 billion) in profit. That is almost twice the GDP of Botswana (€18.1 billion) and nearly three times Namibia’s GDP (€11.5 billion).

Ireland plays a hugely disproportionate role in facilitating investments into fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. In 2023, the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland generated an estimated 72.5 million tons of CO2e. This is more than the CO2e emissions for the entire country of Ireland—and more than ten times that generated by Sierra Leone.

The Global Human Impact

The climate crisis is here, now, and it is causing disproportionate harm in the Global South. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels and increasingly severe cyclones are displacing coastal communities, with projections indicating that 17% of the entire country could be underwater by 2050. The legally binding Paris Agreement on climate change explicitly acknowledges the importance of tackling private finance. Its three overarching goals are: keeping below 1.5C of warming; increasing adaptation and making finance flows consistent with low emissions and resilience.

This gives a clear mandate for action: both tax reform and corporate regulation are needed to tackle financial flows, and both nationally in Ireland and at EU level, ‘polluter pays’ taxes are lacking and regulation of the financial sector remains weak and fragmented. While EU regulation exists, it is designed more to nudge investors toward more sustainable investment practices by increasing transparency and reporting levels than to enforce strict standards. And it is moving in the wrong direction: the recently passed EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive excluded investments; and now the EU Commission’s Omnibus legislative proposal threatens to undo the limited gains made on climate plans, as well as blocking future attempts for stronger action at national level.

The Risk of Inaction

Fossil fuel investment is too profitable to remain weakly regulated. If Ireland continues with its current strategy of encouraging FDI at all costs, and relying on weak EU regulation, we are headed for catastrophe. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that every fraction of a degree beyond 1.5°C brings irreversible consequences: collapsed ice sheets, vanishing coral reefs, and extreme weather events that will make vast regions of the planet uninhabitable. And yet, companies are developing oil and gas fields that could push global warming beyond 2°C.

Our research found that 91% of the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland were to companies that have plans for fossil fuel expansion like these. Ireland cannot afford inaction on this issue.

About This Research

The figures in this report regarding investment from Ireland are based on new research commissioned by ActionAid Ireland and Trócaire. In the paper, we uncover the scale of fossil fuel investment through Ireland, who the investors are, and in which fossil fuel companies they are investing. We analyse the current regulatory framework and explain why it is inadequate—and moving in the wrong direction. And we make specific recommendations for change, which are summarised below.

Summary of Recommendations

Regulate the private financial sector
Ireland must end its outsized role as an enabler of destructive fossil fuel investment. Ireland should introduce a strong gender-responsive national human rights and environmental due diligence framework which includes the regulation of investors with respect to human rights and the environment and climate. The transposition of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive could achieve this if downstream activities are included and the Omnibus proposal is rejected. Ireland should prohibit investments in fossil fuel expansion and require investors to implement climate transition plans consistent with a 1.5°C climate limit.

Endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Ireland should endorse developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to curb fossil fuel expansion and commit to a fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels.

Support tax justice
Ireland should support bold and fair new global tax rules through the UN Framework Convention on Tax, should adopt all OECD BEPS measures, and should conduct an updated and comprehensive spillover analysis of its tax policy. Ireland should take coordinated action globally, at the EU level and domestically to introduce a range of new taxes to mobilise finance needed for climate justice, based on ‘polluter pays’ and social equity principles such as wealth taxes for the highest earners, climate damages tax on investors, fossil fuel production taxes and levies on aviation and shipping.

Finance a just transition
Ireland must also meet its fair share climate finance obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and pay our ecological debt to the Global South. Ireland should support conditionality-free debt cancellation for countries on the front lines of the climate crisis, commit to a new UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, moving debt negotiations from the IMF to the UN, and to a debt workout mechanism that is fully representative and fair.