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The science is unequivocal. The 12-minute video above succinctly outlines this complex issue. The figures at the bottom of this page are eye-watering…and that’s just from processing meat and dairy.

“From production to transportation packaging use and waste management, based on the most detailed meta analysis of life cycle assessments to date, on average it takes 71kg of CO2 to produce 1kg of beef. For lamb, it’s about 40kg; pigs 12kg; and poultry 10kg.

“Some 26% of greenhouse gasses comes from agriculture. By far the largest share is methane and nitrous oxide from cattle. Methane alone has already caused caused around 24-40% of human-made warming.

“The destruction of forests for farmland not only releases the CO2 that was bound in the flora, it sets free carbon that was stored in the soil and destroys its ability to store it in the future. This aspect accounts for much of the range of emissions in beef.”

This loss continues in Aotearoa (13,000 hectares lost in the past 5 years alone). Then there’s the nitrogen and phosphates added to farms that ends up in waterways, which results in, amongst other things, algae blooms that emit methane when they die:

“Between 1991 and 2019, estimates from sales data of nitrogen applied to land in fertiliser increased from 62,000 to 452,000 tonnes (just over a sixfold increase, 629 percent).

“Since our last update of this indicator in April 2019, there was a 5.4 percent increase from 2015 to 2019 in nitrogen applied from fertiliser. In this period, urease inhibitor use increased 48 percent.” – Statistics NZ

And then there’s the palm oil imported to feed our ‘grass fed’ cows:

“A new Greenpeace International report has found evidence of systematic violations by the Indonesian Government regarding plantation and forest release permits in the Papua region. The report also finds that clearing forest for palm plantations in the Papua area could release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, undoing previous climate action. 

“New Zealand is the world’s biggest importer of palm kernel expeller–a product of the palm industry used as supplementary feed for New Zealand’s 6.5 million dairy cows. 

“In 2018, a Greenpeace investigation found that Fonterra’s key supplier of PKE, Wilmar International, has been linked with the mass destruction of rainforest in Papua, Indonesia. In 2020, Fonterra handed over its half of PKE-importing business Agrifeeds to business partnerWilmar International. 

“Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner Amanda Larsson says the dairy industry’s continued use of PKE is one of myriad ways that intensive dairying is fuelling the climate crisis. 

“Right now, dairying is New Zealand’s biggest climate polluter. We’ve got methane from 6.5 million cows, nitrous oxide from cows and synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and carbon from the coal used to process milk,” says Larsson.” – Greenpeace April, 2021

Finally, there’s the carbon cost of processing all that meat and dairy. Remember, this is in addtion to the methane, nitrous oxide and CO2 emissions from growing this meat on farms. Fonterra is the worst carbon polluter in the country, emitting a staggering 16.3 million tonnes of eCO2 in 2020 alone. Silver Fern farms emitted 8.3 million tonnes (Table 9 below: from the New Zealand Government EPA report ‘ETS Participant Emissions‘, October 2021, pages 27-30).

So yes, meat and dairy really is that bad for the climate.

Greenhouse gas emissions from Fonterra and other dairy and meat processors New Zealand

More information

COP26 logo

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The carbon budget: a moving target that politicians just moved beyond reach.

Fig. 1. This live feed from the Mercator Institute is, by default, set to show how much time we have left before the CO2 budget to stay under 2°C is no longer possible. The CO2 budget is in tonnes. Currently (18 March 2022), it’s 1,060Gt (Gt = 1 billion tonnes). At the present rate of emissions, this will run out around April 2047.
 
However, if we want the planet to remain habitable for most (but not all) people, and accept losing entire ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef, we need to keep the average temperature rise under 1.5°C.

Click the box on the top right ‘1.5°C scenario‘ to see that a 66% chance of succeeding means that (as of 18 March 2022), we can emit no more that 309Gt. At the current rate of emissions, that’s July 2029.

Bankrupting the Carbon Budget:

What tipping points mean for the carbon budget

In Bankrupting the Carbon Budget: Part I, tipping points were explained in Videos 1 and 2.

Others tipping points include wildfires in the Arctic and Australia. Together these released around 1Gt of CO2 in 2020. The devastation was so great in places that the conditions that led to the evolution of these ancient ecosystems no longer exist. ‘Zombie’ wildfires in boreal forests in Siberia and Canada and Alaska continue to burn peat underground over winter, re-igniting record-breaking forest fires in the summer of 2021.

These forests, which make up large parts of the biosphere that once absorbed carbon and locked it away, are now releasing carbon to the atmosphere together with human-caused emissions. They have passed a tipping point; a point of no return. The countdown clock in Fig. 1 doesn’t include these emissions because the compound effects are so complex, they have yet to be included in Earth systems models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But the atmosphere doesn’t care where these emissions originate. Nor how much nations—most notably New Zealand—or businesses cheat on their carbon accounting. The reality is that the carbon budget is a globally shared account. Governments think they know how much we have left to ‘spend’, but the burning forests and melting permafrost and methane clathrates are making CO2 withdrawals over which we have no control. All we know is that somewhere between warming of 1-2°C, some tipping points will be irreversible and warming will accelerate, causing even more tipping points to fall like dominoes.

A race against time

Currently, atmospheric CO2 is around 418ppm and climbing 2-3ppm every year. Global average temperatures are 1.2°C and rising. The last time CO2 in the atmosphere exceeded 400ppm was during the Pliocene Epoch (2.6-5.3 million years ago). Global average temperatures were 2-3°C warmer, Antarctica was 14°C warmer, and melting ice caps added 10-20 metres to sea levels.
 
So why aren’t we already that hot?


The relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and warming is well-understood physics and chemistry. But there is a delay—a lag time of 10-20 years—between adding CO2 to the atmosphere and warming. So even if we switch off all emissions today, things will get hotter over the next two decades. It takes even longer for melting icecaps to raise sea levels, unless there’s an abrupt Meltwater Event (historically, these have raised sea levels as much as 4m/century).

The IPCC is banking our future existence on the lag time to literally buy us time to drawdown enough CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently store it back where it came from, with fingers crossed that will return the planet to a safe operating space of 350ppm. 

The Plan: built-in assumptions

The crucial thing about The Plan is that it depends entirely on assumptions. The most important assumption is that carbon capture technologies will draw down and safely store CO2 underground before warming triggers irreversible tipping points. This assumption (otherwise known as magical thinking) is because there isn’t enough land on Earth to plant enough trees to offset emissions while still being able to grow food to feed an exploding global population:

“If we absolutely maximised the amount of vegetation all land on Earth could hold, we’d sequester enough carbon to offset about ten years of greenhouse gas emissions at current rates. After that, there could be no further increase in carbon capture.
 
“Together, land plants and soils hold about 2,500Gt of carbon – about three times more than is held in the atmosphere.
 
“In recognition of these fundamental constraints, scientists estimate that the Earth’s land ecosystems can hold enough additional vegetation to absorb between 40 and 100Gt of carbon from the atmosphere. Once this additional growth is achieved (a process which will take a number of decades), there is no capacity for additional carbon storage on land.”

– Bonnie Waring, Senior Lecturer, Grantham Institute, Climate Change and Environment, Imperial College London

In spite of this limitation, deploying natural climate solutions (NCS) to draw down carbon into restored natural ecosystems would help restore critical, life-supporting ecosystem services.
 
Because we literally cannot live without these services, including their role in climate adaptation and mitigation, every government and council should be treating natural ecosytems as critical natural infrastructure. This is a higher-order priority than critical built infrastructure. Built infrastructure cannot exist without natural infrastructure, whereas natural infrastructure does not need built infrastructure.
 
So, what does The Plan look like?

The Plan by the numbers: 2019 – 2050

  • Atmospheric concentration at the start of 2019: 408ppm
  • Emit: no more than 400Gt of CO2 over the next 21 years; this would add around 23ppm to the atmosphere.
  • Offset emissions: as some emissions are unavoidable, they must be 100% offset by drawing down the same amount of CO2 as emitted and storing it permanently underground or in natural ecosystems. Plantation forestry is by definition not permanent, so it shouldn’t be regarded as a permanent offset because the carbon in it is recycled back into the atmosphere.
  • Draw down: an average 3.9Gt of CO2 every year (total 81.9Gt between 2019-2050) and store it underground and in natural ecosystems. In total, this would remove around 10.5ppm. Again, plantation forestry shouldn’t be regarded as a permanent drawdown.
  • Together, The Plan means that atmospheric concentration as of January 2050  will be: 408ppm + 23ppm – 10.5pm = 420.5ppm.
  • Limitations to offsetting and drawdown:
    • The world’s terrestrial ecosystems can only hold between 40 and 100Gt, so by 2050, CO2 will need to be permanently stored elsewhere.
    • Burning forests and melting permafrost and methane clathrates are emitting CO2 and methane. We don’t know how much, we have no control over it, but we do know this is eating into the existing carbon budget.

The Plan by the numbers: 2050 – 2100

  • The planned atmospheric concentration at the start of 2050: 420.5ppm
  • Emit: zero CO2
  • Offset: As some emissions are unavoidable, they must be 100% offset by drawing down the same amount of CO2 as emitted and storing it permanently underground. By now, terrestrial ecosystems will be unable to store any more carbon.
  • Draw down average 24Gt/year until 2100 (24Gt x 50 years = 1,250Gt or 72ppm) and store it…somewhere.
  • Planned atmospheric concentration at the start of 2100: 420.5ppm – 72ppm  = 348.5ppm.
  • Limitations to offsetting and draw down:

The Plan: how are we doing so far? 2019 – 2021

  • Atmospheric concentration at the start of 2019: 408ppm
  • Atmospheric concentration at start of 2022: 418ppm, ie, we’re going to hit  420.5pm before 2024, not 2050.
  • Emitted: 107Gt of CO2 (26.7% of the 21-year budget ‘spent’ in 3 years)
  • Offset: A handful of the world’s largest carbon polluters are buying up most of the land available for afforestation/reforestation to offset their emissions, leaving no available land for others to offset theirs. This includes land needed to feed people. Many are investing in low value or ‘ghost’ forests such as palm oil plantations, because plants that grow faster earn far more money from carbon credits. Many corporations have no plans to ever become carbon neutral because they will pass the cost of cheap and often useless offsets onto customers. The New Zealand Government, which is using taxpayer dollars to subside the eye-watering carbon cost of agriculture (giving them a 95% discount on emissions), and Fonterra, our largest carbon polluter, also plan to buy carbon credits offshore because they’re cheaper.
“New Zealand’s proposals to COP-26 were dismaying, seeking to shift the task of seriously tackling climate change to others. Spending five billion dollars on international credits to ‘restore’ forests overseas when our own forests are dying is like investing in someone else’s business when your own is going bankrupt. It’s irresponsible.”
 
– Dame Anne Salmond, Distinguished Professor in anthropology at the University of Auckland, and 2013 New Zealander of the Year.

  • Draw down: In spite of all the reforestation and rewilding projects around the globe, terrestrial ecosystem destruction (land use change) exceeded reforestation and offsetting by approximately 10Gt (Fig. 2). A large chunk of these losses are from the Amazon, parts of which have become so dry that they can no longer support re-forestation, so they’re turning in savannahs or being used to grow palm oil, soya, and methane-emitting cows.
  • Limitations to offsetting and drawdown:
    • Oddities with emissions trading schemes not accounting for the value of carbon locked in established forests and their soils, has created perverse incentives: old-growth and naturally regenerating forests are being cut down and/or burned so they can be replaced by fast growing monoculture crops like pine forests that earn more from carbon credits (if they survive wildfires and rapidly rising temperatures). And COP26 did nothing to prevent this from happening into the future (scroll down).
    • The only company extracting CO2 and permanently storing it underground (versus selling it as fuel) is in Iceland. In September 2021, Climeworks’ operations scaled up. It now draws down and stores 4,000 tonnes CO2/year. To scale up to 3.9Gt/year (‘The Plan’) would require building and deploying 9.5 million additional fully operating plants of the same size. To scale up to 24Gt/year from 2050 onward would require 58.5 million additional fully operational plants of the same size. And then there’s this:

“No artificial machines that are even in the design stage will also clean our air, clean our water, provide habitat for wildlife and all the other useful features of trees.” – Sophie Bertazzo, Senior editor, Conservation International

Fig. 2. Sources of carbon emissions 2021 (Image: www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions)
Fig. 2. Sources of carbon emissions 2021 (Image: www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions)

COP26: bankrupting the carbon budget

“We are on the verge of the abyss, and when you are on the verge of the abyss, you need to be very careful about what the next step is.  And the next step is COP26 in Glasgow.”

– Antonio Guterres Secretary General for the United Nations
 
Video 1: “I apologise for the way this process has unfolded. I am deeply sorry. I also understand the deep disappointment but I also think, as you have noted, that it is vital that we protect this package.”

– Alok Sharma, President COP26 following last minute changes from India and China.
 
Sharma apologised because India and China hijacked the meeting in the last minutes, demanding that the wording of the final agreement be that coal would be ‘phased down’ not ‘phased out’. China, the world’s largest emitter, won’t commit to net zero until 2060. India, whose emission are increasing fast every year, won’t commit to net zero until 2070. 
 
As Sharma pointed out, the final package, as weak as it was, brings agreement to the rules in Paris Agreement. And, while it’s taken 165 years, fossil fuels have now been formally recognised as the primary driver of climate change.
 
The ‘Reducing Deforestation’ COP26 Article
 
This looks like a win…except that the same declaration was also made 17 years ago, after which deforestation subsequently increased:
“The Glasgow declaration on forests and land use is a pledge to end or significantly reduce deforestation by 2030… In 2014 the New York declaration on forests promised to cut deforestation by 50% by 2020 and end it completely by 2030. Since then there’s been an increase in global deforestation contributing an estimated 23% to total global CO2 emissions.

“Under the UN rules, man-made plantations count as forests even though they contain none of the rich ecosystems and biodiversity of indigenous forests. Environmental groups worry that a big chunk of the $19.2 billion dollars allocated to the Glasgow declaration will be used to tear down existing forestry land to create more of these plantations for things like palm oil, paper and wood pellets, instead of preserving and protecting the trees and plants and wildlife that are now so critically endangered. 

“And how about this doozy: the declaration’s terminology of deforestation refers to ‘permanent loss of forests when land is fully converted to some other use like agriculture or development’. It’s almost completely silent on the role of traditional logging in driving forest degradation from within. Under this agreement loggers can still disappear deep inside a rainforest like the Amazon and destroy forest biodiversity and carbon stocks resulting in almost exactly the same devastating impacts as true deforestation.”

– David Borlace, Video 2 (below)
 
Between 2012 and 2018, New Zealand indigenous land cover area decreased by 12,869ha. In 2020 alone we lost 8,530ha of native forest. There is no reason to expect that trend or enforcement of current or future policies to reverse that trend.
 
So where does that leave us?
 
Carbon Brief has done a full analysis of the outcomes. If every country actually delivers on their promises and statements made at COP26, warming will be around 2.4°C. But that was before India and China insisted in last minute changes. China, India, Australia, and Russia announced plans to open more coal mines. And oil production from OPEC increased.
Climate Action Tracker breaks down the numbers (Fig. 3).
 
The most commonly repeated mantra that you’ll hear on the news, is that to stay within 1.5°C target, global emissions need to fall 45% by 2030. But that’s based on The Plan. The countdown clock at the top of the page, which reflects what’s actually happening in the atmosphere, is clear: to have a 66% chance of staying under 1.5°C emissions need to fall to zero by 2027. As we have no control over the growing emissions from wildfires, melting permafrost and methane clathrates, we had also better start drawing down and permanently storing CO2 as fast as possible.

Fig. 3. The most optimistic scenario of 1.8C (pale blue box) requires every single country to meet every single promise and every single target by 2030. This does not include tipping points (Image and linked PDF report: Climate Action Tracker. )
Fig. 3. The most optimistic scenario of 1.8C (pale blue box) requires every single country to meet every single promise and every single target by 2030. This does not include tipping points (Image and linked PDF report: Climate Action Tracker. )

COP26: The oceans

As Bonnie Waring said in the quote above:

“If we absolutely maximised the amount of vegetation all land on Earth could hold…”

The oddity in The Plan is that it largely ignores 70% of the surface of the planet that’s not land: the oceans, or more specifically the blue carbon in them. For the first time, the capability of the oceans to rapidly draw down and permanently store vast quantities of CO2 was finally addressed at COP26.

New Zealand has an exclusive oceanic economic zone 14 times larger than our land area. Why isn’t the government (and heavy carbon polluters) using that incredible capacity to invest far more in locally produced blue carbon? Fed by the sun, with no need for irrigation or agricultural chemicals, some species can grow up to 1m/day, drawing down as much as five times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than rainforests, and permanently sequestering if not harvested and instead, cut and dropped into deep ocean.

Watch this (deep blue) space.

Video 2 : Comprensive 18-minute analysis of COP26
 

More information

  • COP26: The final draft
  • Glasgow’s 2030 credibility gap: net zero’s lip service to climate action: Climate Action Tracker
  • Detailed analyses of each component of COP26: Carbon Brief (scroll down the page a bit to see the links to each section)
Cop 26 Nature

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October 31: that’s the date for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, COP26. It’s now clear that the Paris target to limit temperatures to 1.5 degrees has failed. Meeting these targets set by governments, including New Zealand, would result in warming well above 3 degrees by 2100.

“We are facing the twin threats of climate change and biodiversity loss. One cannot be solved without addressing the other…. Yet only 3% of global climate finance is spent on nature-based solutions, and only 1% for adaptation.”

One of the three key goals of COP26 is to:

“Protect and restore nature for the benefit of people and climate” and to “call on governments, businesses and civil society to endorse the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature and make ambitious commitments to build nature positive economies and societies.”

In support of this goal, every day from 01 September until October 31, we’ll be posting an extract from this website on Facebook.

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Left: 4.00pm 29 May. Water flow 4 cumecs.

Right: 4.00pm 30 May. Water flow 966 cumecs.

Fig.1 (Photos: Nick Ledgard)

Ashley River Rakahuri

By definition, braided rivers are made up of multiple channels or ‘braids’. Systematically forcing them into the solitary confinement of single channels is turning them into what University of Waikato’s Professor James Brasington calls “zombie” rivers, waterways locked into position between stopbanks and their headwaters. Planting willows and poplars as a ‘natural’ way to hold them in place has just exacerbated the problem. Confining braided rivers not only creates problems for freshwater ecosystems including habitat for braided river birds, it also makes these rivers prone to catastrophic flooding.

“If we put our rivers into straight-jackets, they lose the diversity of form and process that are fundamental to the creation of thriving ecosystems. Instead, we should make space for rivers to erode their corridors, flood naturally in areas that are of less value which will in turn, reduce risks in more sensitive areas. We must work with natural processes to reduce the flood risk and support healthy river ecosystems.” – James Brassington

Last weekend, several zombie rivers in Canterbury broke free and invaded towns and properties.

It’s not like we weren’t warned. In 2019, NIWA published this extraordinarily well-ignored report outlining the current NZ$40 billion flood risks to Canterbury (no, that’s no a misprint; it’s billion, not million) (Fig. 2) .

Fig. 2: From 2019 NIWA's 2019 report, 'New Zealand Fluvial and Pluvial Flood Exposure' (page 8). Exposure to flood risk does not mean all of the areas on the map (click the image) will flood. However, the risks are increasing as the climate changes as warmer air carries more moisture.
Fig. 2: From 2019 NIWA’s 2019 report, ‘New Zealand Fluvial and Pluvial Flood Exposure’ (page 8). Exposure to flood risk does not mean all of the areas on the map (click the image) will flood. However, the risks are increasing as the climate changes as warmer air carries more moisture.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who read their entire report, much less acted on it. A small extract made headline news in a North Canterbury paper and was promptly forgotten.

Two weeks ago, I gave a presentation to the Waimakariri drainage group on the risks of flooding from pluvial and fluvial events and rising sea levels. It caused some discomfort, but then again, I was talking about climate change. A concept that probably seemed too remote to lose much sleep over.

Last weekend’s floods will no doubt make headline news again in our local papers. And in a few weeks it will also probably be forgotten by most people, especially those who weren’t directly affected. Part of the reason is that the phrase ‘1-in-100 event’ is often misunderstood, leading to a false sense of security that these zombies and their big brother rivers are unlikely to escape again in our lifetimes. (The term ‘1-in-100 years’ is in fact a statistical annual exceedance probability. It’s arguably moot in any case as many hydrologists consider stationarity to be dead.)

And then there’s the false perception that ECan is obligated to shove every metre of rivers back into solitary confinement. The situation on the Okuku River is a case in point. The poor little Okuku, like many zombie rivers, is so glutted with weeds that it’s unrecognisable as a braided river. It’s not even mentioned on the braided rivers website. I mention it here now, because this section of the Okuku is outside the river ratings area. Councils are under no obligation to protect those who  live and farm in its riverbed.  At some point, properties in riverbeds are likely to be deemed too risky to insure, which raises the question of who will pay for more extreme weather events? And how can we tell if climate change is the cause?

In January this year, nine New Zealand river experts wrote an article in The Conversation, titled ‘Why we should release New Zealand’s strangled rivers to lessen the impact of future floods’.

“We shouldn’t be surprised when our rivers break their banks — that’s just a river being a river. Current management practices in Aotearoa treat rivers as static, in the hope of making them more predictable.

“But this can lead to disasters.

“Unless we change management practices to work with a river, giving it space to move and allowing channels to adjust, we will continue to put people and rivers on a collision course.

“When flood risk is managed poorly, disadvantaged groups of the population are often disproportionately impacted. Given climate change predictions of more extreme floods and drought, the problem will only get worse.”

One of the authors of this article, Dr Jo Hoyle from NIWA, will be presenting a paper at the next Braided Rivers seminar at Lincoln University Wednesday 14 July. If you are reading this after the event, a PDF of her presentation will be available here.

For more information see the pages on this website: