The Climate Commission says if New Zealand doesn’t meet the climate commitments it signed up to under the Paris Agreement, the country could face “greater scrutiny” from its trading partners.
This is according to the Commission’s Chief Executive Jo Hendy and Chairman Rod Carr who appeared at a public webinar on Friday to discuss a new emissions monitoring report released earlier in the week.
The Commission has the job of independently monitoring the country’s progress on reducing emissions. Earlier this week it released an emissions monitoring report, the first annual report on the subject.
The report has looked at emissions data up until April 2024 and assessed how current emissions reductions policies and plans are setting up NZ’s ability to meet its climate goals.
The report suggests NZ is likely on track to meet the first emissions budget – but this comes with several caveats.
One of the caveats is based on newer information received after the Commission’s findings were already finalised around whether its older projections might have underestimated how much deforestation has happened in NZ.
“If this is the case, it makes it less likely that the first emissions budget will be met. We will know more later this year when updated projections and official estimates of ‘target accounting’ emissions are released,” Carr said in the report.
According to the Commission, available emissions data showed the first emissions budget of 290 million tons of carbon emission between 2022-25 may be met.
But this estimate has “high uncertainty” because of rising transport emissions, low rainfall for hydroelectricity generation and increased levels of deforestation.
“Further action by the Government to reduce emissions would decrease the risk of missing the first emissions budget,” the report said.
The Commission is recommending the Government place “increased effort” on measures and policies that can improve the chances of NZ meeting its first emissions budget.
“Those reductions would also build over time to contribute to meeting the second emissions budget (2026–2030) and third emissions budget (2031–2035),” the report said.
The second emissions budget is 303 million tons of carbon emissions and the third emissions budget is 257 million tons.
In mid-July, the Ministry for Environment (MfE) publicly released documents on its second emissions reduction plan which revealed NZ is set to narrowly meet its first and second emissions budgets for 2022-25 and 2026-30.
However, the MfE’s report said NZ is set to go over the 2031-35 budget by 17 million tonnes of carbon emissions.
The Climate Change Commission believes there are “significant risks” to NZ meeting the second and third emissions budgets, according to its emissions monitoring report.
Agreements
Carr said in Friday's webinar NZ was “up against a rock” because if the Government didn’t meet its domestic emissions budget this decade, that didn’t change NZ’s obligations under the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the Paris Agreement.
New Zealand is one of 196 countries that signed up to the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international climate change treaty that came into force in 2016.
Signing the Agreement meant NZ had to declare a NDC setting out what a country is going to do to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts.
According to the Commission, NZ committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030 as its first NDC.
In 2021, NZ then updated that to a target of a 50% reduction of net emissions below gross 2005 levels by the year 2030.
New Zealand will know by the 31st December in 2030 if it has met its NDC agreement.
Hendy said in the webinar that if NZ doesn’t meet it, it’ll cause a “loss of influence on the global scene” when it comes to climate change as well as “greater scrutiny” from NZ’s trading partners.
“Particularly where we have free trade agreements and particularly with those strong climate elements within them,” she said.
Hendy added that global consumers and customers were also increasingly scrutinising their supply chains and looking for products that are reducing emissions.”
“And so we do increase risks around loss of the global markets in that respect as well.”
Carr said a large number of other countries are going to meet their NDCs.
“You don't want to be the pariah, wealthy nation that doesn't meet its NDC if others are,” he said.
“We've now signed trade agreements in the UK and Europe that make meeting your Paris commitments part of your right to access those affluent markets. And it's not just a matter of accessing it for certain products, accessing it for all products. The Europeans have made that clear.”
29 Comments
Perhaps you could address the thread?
If not, go away, The evidence of human forcing is done and dusted; we need to be addressing adaption (having left mitigation too late). I appreciate you will have some interest in delaying the discussion - a debt-bet or peer aspirations - but the rest of us have to address the physics.
Which the CCC is not doing, to a significant degree. That is not surprising; they were asked the wrong question. The real question is: How do we get from an unsustainable situation (overpopulated and overconsuming) to a sustainable one, with the least disruption?
That question has yet to be asked - by politicians, by the public, and mostly, by the media.
You're right. We have to change the way we live, and doing that in a just manner is the only possible way it can be made to stick in the Western Liberal Democracies.
Given our bloody awful ability to manage anything operational at a national level, and the polarisation of the issues by didactic, extremist views that somehow seem to get the most attention - I guess it sells eyeballs - I don't hold out much hope for sensible, innovative and just solutions.
You mean I've got it completely wrong, because according to the 'experts', oil should have already run out, the ozone layer disappeared, the ice caps melted, and acid rain should have destroyed all crops.
And not forgetting...running out of water....meanwhile there's the average rainfall where I live. I've studied human gullibility for many years.
Anyone going to COP29 in Baku to save the planet, where they produce loads of oil?
Yes, you've got it completely wrong.
And your listening skills seem to be culpable, at least in part.
Try doing some real research. Google World3, BAU and BAU2. Tell me where that says 'running out'? Read the Limits to Growth - any version: The initial one, any of the 10-year updates, the peer-reviews. Any. Not a one says that.
You haven't - ever - bothered checking for yourself, have you? Took the bleating rhetoric of others as gospel.
But on the basis that you, unresearched, KNOW; and you fling assertions like confetti.
Scientific rigor is a tad different - trust me.
Are you going to COP29 in Baku?
Maybe you could get a ride in one of those hundreds of business jets that'll be arriving for the 2024 talkfest about how they're going to save the planet from people that own business, and even jumbo jets.
Interestingly enough, my grandfather was in Baku in WW1, he was a commando in the Dunsterville Force, fighting the Ottomans and Russians....over oil.
A sane comment for once.
So too were T.E.Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Allenby - all fighting for the oil. Hitler made a move for it too - indeed the failure to get there, is the real (physics) reason Germany lost (ersatz coal-to was too low an EROEI).
The best book of the lot, is Longhurst's Adventure in Oil - his naive 1958 history of BP (these days they would censor/spin much of it).
Finite resource. Exponential growth, best-first. Only one outcome (depletion) and only one variable (time). Which is why 'hasn't yet' doesn't equate to 'won't'.
I've got a few books on human gullibility.
'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds', first printed in 1841 is a classic, and another I have is 'Annals of Gullibility'.
You can see it every day on the internet, whether it's goldbugs believing that gold is 'money', or suckers getting caught in inheritance or other get-rich-quick scams.
You have a problem appraising time, and a tendency to assume self-reinforcing stuff.
Ozone was only addressed - and we aren't fully in the clear, yet - because there was a cheap alternative to CFCs. If there had not been, folk like you would still be denying that there was human-driven ozone depletion (because they wanted to keep their fridges).
The ice-caps are melting - faster than predicted. Again, your appraisal of time seems to be 'instant'.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/greeland-ice-mel…
Oil was never 'running out'. That phrase came from the spin-doctors (and they can be traced to Bernays) championing continuance. It is inevitable that the rate of extraction of a finite resource will peak. Rate, of course, is a per-time thing (your problem, again).
Acid rain was dealt-to in the First World - Europe, US - by legislation. Not in the Third - and it's still a problem (just not reported in First World media).
And extrapolating your faulty grasp of all those, into a posit that growth can go forever (which is what you are about, and core, isn't it?) is a leap that no - repeat no - scientific-paper peer-review process would ever pass.
History's chokka with failed predictions and scams.
You have to recognise that many human beings get very excited, they even riot over non-events. Kiwis would probably be the best examples of that . A good example is the dopey nuclear legislation. Since 1987 when it was enacted, thousands of NZers have been killed on the roads, but nuclear ships and submarines which are extraordinarily safe, are banned.
Unsophisticated kiwis have demonstrated and rioted over a navigation system, apartheid in South Africa, even rioted over nothing on one occasion in 1984. Oddly enough they haven't rioted over Russia attacking another sovereign country.
The US christian right may have always been idiots, but at least in the time of Reagan they had the ability to suggest solutions, even if stupid ones. Todays fairyland "conservatives" appear to have suffered inbreeding since then!
"Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel has aroused the ire of environmentalists with a suggestion that people wear hats, sunglasses and protective sun creams to combat the added risk of skin cancer as man-made chemicals reduce the Earth’s protective ozone layer.Hodel, a conservative Republican with a strong aversion to government regulation, is urging the Reagan Administration to consider such a “public awareness” campaign as one possible alternative to curbing the chlorofluorocarbon chemicals"
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-05-30-mn-3572-story.html
New Zealand is a net carbon sink if everything that is not allowed to be included in the climate emissions calculations is included.
"Within Australasia, Australia was a net source of 38.2 ± 75.8 TgC yr−1, and New Zealand was a net CO2 sink of −38.6 ± 13.4 TgC yr−1."
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023GB007845
A UK study showed 57 companies were responsible for 80% of global climate emissions – which had increased since the Paris agreement.
NZ is in a good place to adapt to climate change, despite its 0.17% share of global climate emissions.
'In these systems, the carbon is not sequestered in the terrestrial biosphere long-term but rather exported in the form of harvested wood products or milk and meat. The CO2 is eventually returned to the atmosphere via respiration on a longer timescale and/or outside of New Zealand Australasia’s non-territorial carbon emissions, mainly those embodied in the trade of Australia's metallurgical, thermal coal, and liquefied natural gas, constitute an important component of the fossil fuel emissions burned and consumed overseas. Understanding the trade flows of non-territorial carbon will become increasingly important as countries signatories to the Paris Agreement strive to achieve net zero emissions.
Then there's the 'starting from 1990' rort (ignoring prior de-forestation/degradation).
“Further action by the Government to reduce emissions would decrease the risk of missing the first emissions budget,” the report said.
Fortunately for the Commission there is no link between number of people in NZ and our emissions...
If there was, they'd have to state the bloomin' obvious which is that we should stop growing our population with immigration. I find it hard to take them seriously when such simple options continue to go unmentioned.
Perhaps they could do some scenario analysis with their model and tell us how going from 4m to 5m people changes their projections.
Well, feeding the exponential growth of the economic super organism is ranked ahead of having a stable, resilient, clean, beautiful biosphere. Now growth per capita is fully tapped out, the only option is increasing the "capitas", to paper over the cracks in the bleeding obvious. Growth is done.
Time for bean counters and their cult of hangers on, to find another pet fetish to occupy their restless urges. Hopefully the next idelogy they hang their hat on, is less destructive and more grounded physical reality?
Climate change or not. Human induced or not. Fossil fuels are finite, poisonous and EXPENSIVE.... The shift to low carbon sustainable fuel sources is good for business. Our international markets demand it. Achieving our climate targets helps keep us on track. Exceeding them means we get there faster. >>> insert cartoon of ostrich with its head buried in the tail pipe of a car. Those who remove their heads will be the winners.
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