Climate report: fire risk rising

WELLINGTON: We are not as clean and green as one might think — and New Zealanders need to stop driving so much.

That is the message from the Ministry for the Environment’s latest report, ‘‘Our Atmosphere and Climate’’, which measures emissions in New Zealand and their major drivers.

New Zealand has ambitious legislation on curbing climate change, but the report puts things into perspective: fire risk is increasing, New Zealand is one of the worst polluters per capita from road transport in the OECD, and net emissions have grown by almost 60% in less than 30 years.

Ministry deputy secretary of strategy and stewardship Natasha Lewis said the 84page report showed climate change was not a faroff threat.

‘‘Climate change is having a profound impact on us and on our environment . . . and it’s the decisions that each one of us make that are contributing to this.’’

Using data from 30 sites, the report found temperatures increased at 28 sites since 1972.

Although the report did not make recommendations, Ms

Lewis said it should inform decisionmaking everywhere.

‘‘The whole point . . . is to generate response across the country . . . from whanau and hapu level, local government, business, industry and of course government.’’

As Lake Ohau residents mourned the loss of their village to wildfire, the report found extreme fire danger was expected to rise dramatically over the next two decades.

Fire danger was projected to increase by an average of 70% by 2040; the largest increases were set to be in areas not used to fire, such as Wellington and Otago.

‘‘The nature of climate change is it’s often having a compounding effect on a number of issues,’’ Ms Lewis said.

‘‘We see that with wildfire. We also see that when they think of our biodiversity and some of our precious taonga species that are covered in the report.’’

Forest and Bird chief executive Kevin Hague said many of the country’s atrisk, drier places contained rich biodiversity. This was the case when a rare moth was threatened in a fire at Lake Pukaki, its only breeding ground.

‘‘People think of somewhere like the Mackenzie Basin as being an arid environment and assume it’s probably poor in biodiversity, but in fact the biodiversity richness of the Mackenzie is greater than in native forest usually. It’s one of our treasure troves.

‘‘And, of course, the species adapted to those dryland environments are unique to those places.’’

The report predicted that by 2040, Wellington would have a doubling in fire danger to 30 days a year where fire risk was very high or extreme, and coastal Otago a tripling to 20 days a year.

The reports began in 2015, but this was the first time the ministry had measured wildfire risk.

It found that over the past two decades there was an increasing trend in days with very high or extreme fire danger at Napier,

Lake Tekapo, Queenstown, Gisborne, Masterton and Gore.

It noted that, unlike Australian ones, New Zealand ecosystems had not evolved to cope with fire.

Niwa climate scientist Gregor Macara, who worked on the report, has been involved in writing New Zealand’s monthly climate summaries since 2013.

Since then, for each spot that had a nearrecord low monthly temperature, 12 locations had nearrecord high monthly temperatures, he said.

‘‘January 2018 was exceptionally warm and it gave us a taste of what a ‘normal’ January may look like in future. Invercargill had three consecutive days above 30degC, Wellington observed 11 days above 25degC — it usually has just one such day, and Cromwell’s average maximum temperature from 1931 January was an astounding 33.1degC.’’

Out of OECD countries, New Zealand ranked fifthworst in terms of CO2 emissions from road transport — each person pumped 3.2 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year from driving alone, the report said.

The worst offenders were Luxembourg, the United States, Canada and Australia, but New

Zealand ranked worse than Ireland, Iceland, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Report lead science adviser Drew Bingham said this reflected the fact that ‘‘we’re a country that loves cars’’.

‘‘We have one of the highest rates of car ownership in the OECD and in 2018 we had the largest light passenger vehicle fleet to date. We have a lot of cars and we like to drive them.’’

GNS radiocarbon scientist Jocelyn Turnbull said the report should spell out the urgency of ditching cars.

‘‘You driving your car to work every day is a really big part of the problem and it’s spelled out quite clearly in this report. And I don’t think we’re going to stop driving any time soon but we could drive cleaner cars.’’

Mr Hague said New Zealand’s emissions per capita were among the highest in the world, which should trigger a wakeup call.

‘‘We are amongst the worst climate criminals in the world. That creates the burning platform — the moral outrage that requires urgent action. I don’t want to be there, I don’t think many New Zealanders want to be there either.’’ — RNZ

❛ The nature of climate change is it’s

often having a compounding effect on

a number of issues