Auckland’s climate-leading place in peril
ANALYSIS: For seven years Auckland has been a member of the C40 international group of cities that meet agreed criteria for being classed as ‘‘climate leaders’’.
It has been a proud boast, to be alongside Los Angeles, Melbourne, New York and Seoul as a city committed to action to keep global warming to 1.5C.
So far, Auckland Council and its agencies have done a worldclass job on talking the talk, passing a Climate Plan, declaring a climate emergency, and committing to reduce transport emissions by 64% by 2030.
But suddenly the threshold for remaining a global climate leader is looking tough, and by the end of 2024 Auckland is going to need to change its ways to avoid being voted off the island.
Auckland is struggling to move out of the talk-and-plan stage and take action in line with its ambitions. While it made the cut to remain in C40 for 2022, the next test looks tough.
By 2024 five criteria need to be met, one being that the ‘‘mayor and city demonstrate global climate leadership and inspire others to act in support of the (COP21) Paris Agreement’’.
Wayne Brown, elected in October 2022, has acknowledged climate change, but so far has spoken mostly on the need to prepare for the consequences, rather than try to slow global warming.
Auckland also needs to show it is on track to deliver its climate plan to halve its emissions by 2030.
The city’s most detailed work, the Transport Emissions Reduction Plan, has run into trouble at its delivery agency Auckland Transport which insists it doesn’t have the funding to deliver it.
Part of the TERP menu, is to halve driving and achieve a nine-fold increase in public transport use, with 2023 looking to be the bleakest for the public transport network due to a bus driver shortage, and rail network overhauls. Patronage is at 70% of pre-Covid levels
In December 2021 council officials noted only 100 months remained until the 2030 emission-halving deadline.
Progress, they said, had been ‘‘insufficient’’ and major hurdles, such as staff workload and a shortage of committed funding were standing in the way of devising and achieving the big changes needed in Aucklanders’ lives, the report said.
Time is running out. C40 enthusiast and former mayor Phil Goff introduced a Climate
Action Targeted Rate (CATR) in 2022 before stepping out of office, but its ‘‘starter’’ level of funding remains unchanged under Brown, and two other environment-related rates face being reduced to balance the books.
Among its goals CATR was meant to fund an improvement in the reach and frequency of bus routes, but 1000 services each weekday have been cut, and the CATR funding may be diverted.
In the mayor Wayne Brown’s ‘‘Letter of Expectation’’ to Auckland Transport, more space is devoted to reducing the number of road cones, than advancing climate action – which had been its strategic priority.
‘‘Implement AT and council’s objectives under the Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway, within available funding parameters,’’ is all he wrote, leaving the agency with vast wiggle room.
Being in C40 isn’t an end in itself, but it is one measure of whether Auckland is up with 96 other cities in tackling one of the planet’s most existential problems. Time is running out for the city’s leaders to show they will do what they pledged to do, and which Aucklanders have in surveys, told them they should do.