‘Role of the school is to teach facts’

South Canterbury’s Federated Farmers branch president is concerned a newly-introduced climate change teaching resource has no explanation about the difference between New Zealand livestock, which are mostly grass fed, and fossil fuel emissions.

The Minister of Education Chris Hipkins and Climate Change Minister James Shaw launched a new climate change teaching resource for year 7 to year 10 students in January but Federated Farmers is calling for corrections to what they say is ‘‘inaccurate information’’ in the material.

The Climate Change – Prepare Today, Live Well Tomorrow programme is designed to help students understand, live with, and implement change on climate change. To go alongside the programme is wellbeing information to guide teachers on how to deal with children who may become emotional or struggle to cope with what they learn about the impacts of climate change.

However, Federated Farmers climate change spokesman Andrew Hoggard has said there were a number of mistakes in the resource that the ministry needed to go back to and review before they put it out to teachers, because it supported misinformation about New Zealand agriculture’s contribution to global warming.

Federated Farmers South Canterbury branch president Jason Grant said New Zealand red meat and dairy production was one of the most sustainable in the world and children should be taught those facts.

He also claimed livestock emissions are cyclical.

‘‘The grass they eat are sequestering carbons as it’s growing, releasing the carbon. So it is not accumulative so we are not adding to greenhouse gas emissions unlike fossil fuels taken out of the ground and burnt.’’

Overseas livestock were often fed with different systems leading to high emissions, as feed had to be grown and machinery used for harvesting and to transport feed, leading to a larger carbon footprint, he said

‘‘That’s the assumption made that New Zealand is the same as the rest of the world ... it [resource] makes livestock farming look really bad when it’s not nearly as bad and we know that because we’re farming and there is science around this, it’s not just our opinion.’’

As a father-of-three he said he was also worried about children being put off eating meat and dairy products through inaccurate information which could be detrimental to their health.

Another section of the resource encourages students to be activists and stand up for what they believed about climate change. He did not think that was the school’s role.

‘‘The role of the school is to teach facts.’’

He thought it was important to look after the planet and conserve its resources and to teach children how to look after the environment but it needed to be accurate, he said.