Climate change action shelved

‘‘There are lots of little things we can do.’’

Climate change has been sidelined by the Mackenzie District Council for another three years due to a lack of resources.

Council chief executive Suzette van Aswegen said climate change, and measures to tackle it, would not be included in council’s Long Term Plan, despite three major wildfires devastating the Mackenzie Basin over the past 12 months. The Lake O¯ hau wildfire destroyed 48 buildings and cost $34.8 million in insurance payouts.

‘‘To be honest I would love to do innovative things and be entrepreneurial . . . but the fact that we still have building blocks to make a good solid organisation, [means] it is probably not in the next lifetime of this next Long Term Plan for the next three years.

‘‘If the opportunity comes along we might look at it,’’ she said.

The Long Term Plan is the main way council funds projects.

Van Aswegen attended the November Climate Change + Business Conference 2020, run by the Environmental Defence Society, and reported back to council on Tuesday. She said other councils presented on what they were doing to address climate change, with Auckland City Council ‘‘massively ahead of everyone’’.

She said one of the things she took away from the conference was that addressing climate change ‘‘could be small things, it does not have to be massive things’’.

‘‘It could be a genuine desire to go paperless and stop printing this [meeting agenda] off. It could be small little things in the office to save electricity. We could put solar panels on all our buildings. There are lots of little things we can do.

‘‘But as we have learnt, to get those things done takes time. And, to plan it takes a bit ... so it all comes down to the Long Term Plan and I don’t think we are ready for this Long Term Plan to be that innovative, unfortunately.’’

Councillor Anne Munro asked van Aswegen whether climate change was ‘‘a wait-and-see space or should we be proactive, as far as use of our time’’?

Van Aswegen said the council

Suzette van Aswegen Mackenzie District Council

did not have the resources to be proactive. Each business unit in council was currently ‘‘looking at how climate change affects them’’.

‘‘At the same time we are working with the mayoral forum, and a few councillors have chipped in a few dollars, and we are looking at a joint footprint on our carbon emissions.

‘‘And then I guess it is about time we start looking at our fleet.

‘‘We have diesel vehicles, we have come away from petrol to diesel vehicles, which is a little bit better, but I think we can do more in that space.’’

Van Aswegen also said the council would be ‘‘looking at’’ making a sustainability policy, which it does not have.

Over the past 12 months three serious fires – at Burkes Pass, Pu¯ kaki Downs and Lake O¯ hau – destroyed vast swaths of the Mackenzie; 100, 3500 and 5040 hectares of land respectively.

In October, days after the Lake Ohau ¯ wildfire, Department of Conservation Twizel operations manager Karina Morrow said climate change was central to the increasing number of large fire events in the Mackenzie district.

‘‘I think what we learned from [the O¯ hau fire] is that these events will increase, given the increasingly changing climate,’’ she told the Canterbury Aoraki Conservation Board meeting in Timaru.

Van Aswegen was asked to present on the fires to the Climate Change + Business Conference but declined as she was attending remotely.

The Mackenzie District Council is also responsible for issuing resource consents to farmers.

Agriculture makes up 48 per cent of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Ministry for the Environment’s 2018 Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report.