Analysis The year NZ must wake up
New Zealand must convince the world its climate rhetoric is more than hot air, says Charlie Mitchell.
After a tough year preoccupied with Covid-19, the Government will return from its summer break to another crisis.
It already knew about this one. Before the end of last year, it declared a climate emergency, a symbolic process that nevertheless serves as a statement of intent against which it can be held.
That time will come quickly. This year will be the greatest test for any government in recent memory on the climate front. While its last term was devoted to passing the Zero Carbon Act, a framework not requiring any concrete actions to reduce emissions, the Government now faces the unavoidable need to reap what it has sown.
This week’s annual climate summary from Niwa showed the last colder-than-average month was January 2017. Niwa has declared 2020 the seventh-warmest year on record in New Zealand, a now predictable January news story. Globally, 2020 was the jointhottest year on record, capping off the hottest decade since humans could reliably measure temperature.
While the pandemic proved to be a major distraction, it did not change the underlying global context: it is demonstrably getting hotter, and climate change is far outside the realm of the theoretical.
For the Government, its biggest test will come after February 1, when the Climate Change Commission releases its draft emissions budgets for the next 15 years.
It’s likely to be a shock to the system. Until now, there has been little incentive to actually reduce emissions: as a result, they have barely budged in more than a decade. With the prospect of actual numbers and measurable time frames, the era of can-kicking is over.
The Government isn’t legally required to adopt the budgets, but not to do so would be devastating to its credibility, not just locally, but globally.
On the latter front, it can’t take such a risk. There is growing scepticism internationally about the dissonance between New Zealand’s rhetoric and what it has actually accomplished, which in real terms is very little.
On paper, New Zealand is a
This year will be the greatest test for any government in recent memory on the climate front. While its last term was devoted to passing the Zero Carbon Act, a framework not requiring any concrete actions to reduce emissions, the Government now faces the unavoidable need to reap what it has sown.
laggard on almost every front. Although its emissions have been constant for the last decade, it is one of the few countries in the OECD to have increased emissions since 1990.
Its emissions intensity per unit of GDP is third highest in the OECD; emissions intensity per capita is fifth highest. The likes of Climate Action Tracker, a research group that measures climate progress in a range of countries, say New Zealand is well short of where it should be.
These difficulties occurred despite New Zealand’s unusually high proportion of renewable energy, a head start most nations could only dream of having.
While the likes of the United Kingdom have heavily curtailed their use of coal, making considerable climate gains, New Zealand – like the hare in Aesop’s fable – has been snoozing nearby, not having meaningfully reduced any of its major emissions sources.
This year, the Climate Commission will also give advice on a new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the
Paris Agreement; essentially, the reduction target the country has to meet. It is widely recognised that New Zealand’s current NDC is insufficient, and not consistent with keeping warming by 2050 to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels.
That’s a problem, given it is not on track to meet the current target, let alone a stronger one.
Even now, New Zealand is late to the party. At a recent global climate meeting, some countries announced their updated NDCs.
Among them was the UK, which said that by 2030 it would reduce emissions to 68 per cent below 1990 levels; the European Union as a whole submitted a target of a 55 per cent reduction on 1990 levels.
New Zealand’s current target, by comparison, is equivalent to an 11 per cent reduction on 1990 levels by 2030.
These issues together force the Government into a corner. It either follows through with the bold, urgent action necessitated by meeting hard targets, or accepts that it can’t – or won’t – deliver on its rhetoric, leaving it exposed.
Six times the average
There is no longer doubt about New Zealand’s role as a climate laggard.
Before the end of last year, the Government received a report concluding New Zealand is using more than six times its fair share of the carbon emissions budget that would keep global temperature increases within 1.5C of preindustrial levels.
At its current rate of emissions – which is not projected to change substantially – New Zealand will have exhausted its fair share of the remaining carbon budget within just four years.
To keep warming within 2C by 2050, a target generally seen as insufficient, New Zealand would still fall short, using up its share of the budget by 2038.
The report was produced by several European climate groups, and had been commissioned by the Ministry for the Environment.
It applies a planetary boundaries framework to New Zealand. That framework was created by scientists in 2009 and pinpoints nine environmental limits for preserving Earth’s life-support systems. Downscaling those limits to individual countries allows for measuring whether that country is acting in ways consistent with staying inside those boundaries.
In New Zealand’s case, it breached four of the five boundaries analysed, some by a significant margin. Most notable of those was climate change: ‘‘New Zealand exceeds all identified climate per capita allocations assessed for this report, from lower to upper estimates of certainty in avoiding temperature overshoot, for both 1.5C and 2C goals,’’ the report concluded.
Notably, it only included CO2 emissions, not other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. The report acknowledged that, if these were included, New Zealand’s numbers would likely be worse.
On an equity basis, the conclusion is simple, and hard to accept.
New Zealand is freeloading and forcing less financially advantaged nations to go beyond their fair share of emissions reductions to preserve our way of life.
Adding to this particular pressure is New Zealand’s geographic location. Among the countries that would need to pick up the pieces are many of our Pacific neighbours, whose expectations of a safe climate are being gobbled up by New Zealand using far more than its fair share would dictate. Its only defence is that Australia is even worse.
A key priority for the Pacific nations is climate financing, another issue on which New Zealand will be expected to take a stronger role this year.
A report by Oxfam released last year found New Zealand was ranked 21st of 23 developed countries in the amount of climaterelated financing it offered to other countries.
The upcoming COP26 summit in November is expected to have a strong focus on climate financing, including negotiations for an increase in the global sum provided each year, placing pressure on New Zealand to do more, pushed by its Pacific neighbours on the battlefront of climate change.
The link between climate change and foreign relations will become increasingly important. Briefings to incoming ministers after the election included one largely devoted to the subject, which itself reiterated New Zealand’s position as a climate leader in the global community.
There have been successes. New Zealand has been among a small group of countries pushing for reforms to fossil-fuel subsidies, and is taking a lead role in negotiating the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability, which seeks ways to use trade rules to improve climate outcomes.
Those successes, however, risk becoming buried if New Zealand continues to fall short domestically. This year more than any other will prove whether it all amounts to hot air.