This 05 August webinar shares information about the Climate Change Commission’s first annual emissions reduction monitoring report, released in July 2024. The report provides an evidence-based, impartial view of whether the country is on course to reach its goals of reducing and removing greenhouse gas emissions. It provides insight into the progress made, challenges experienced, and opportunities and risks that need to be considered.
The following quote from Dr Rod Carr towards the end of the webinar, paints a realistic picture of what Aotearoa can expect in term of the economic our global standing and the risks. (Pages on this website explain Nationally Determined Contributions, the Paris Accord, and the Emissions Trading Scheme.)
Webinar question: What would happen if New Zealand wasn’t able or didn’t comply with our Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)? What are the implications for us?
Answers:
As time it goes on, meeting our NDCs is getting increasingly more difficult and expensive because of delay.
Not meeting the NDCs: we would certainly expect to see greater scrutiny of our actions from our trading partners particularly where we have free trade agreements (FTAs) and particularly with those strong climate elements within them like the EU FTA.
Not meeting them is also likely to come with a loss of influence and on the global scale in relation to climate change, which may mean we are in worse position to advocate for a response that takes into account our national circumstances.
The final thing is that global consumers and customers are 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.
– Jo Hendy CE: Video, The Climate Change Commission 2024 emissions reduction monitoring report, August 2024
When the rest of the world looks at New Zealand, if we haven’t
met our national determine contributions—we won’t know on the 31st of
December 2030 as it takes a couple of years for inventories and count
up— but when the partners that we care about look at our behaviour and
go, ‘Did you do all that you said you would? Did you do all that you
said you would? And did you do all the things you could have done?’
That’s going to inform whether it’s ‘that you tried hard but missed’ or
‘you didn’t try’.
So foreign countries who are in incurring very real economic
costs to reduce their emissions today— and that includes the Europeans,
the Brits, and the Americans (there’s half a trillion U.S. dollars of
taxpayers money being made available to reduce their emissions so the
idea they’re not doing anything; that’s just wrong)—so when those
countries look at NZ in the early 2030s and they look back to 2020, they
go, ‘Well you could have made a better effort to, for example,
decarbonized ground transport there were known technologies that were
available, but you just chose to buy cheap high polluting cars. You
could have chosen to stop burning as much coal and fossil gas to make
electricity by investing more sooner in renewables, but you chose not
to.’ I think that’s going to influence what the world thinks about New
Zealand ‘s behaviour more than whether we did or did hit the exact
number of tonnes for this decade.
And the rest of the world looks at New Zealand and says,
‘You didn’t try. You didn’t take up the known technologies. You are
short sighted, selfish, and reckless in your use of the climate for
profit.’ I think their attitudes to us will be very different than if we
had tried hard and done all we could but things didn’t turn out well.
– Dr Rod Carr, Video, The Climate Change Commission 2024 emissions reduction monitoring report, August 2024
New Zealand is one of the worst countries in the world in terms of meeting its commitments to keep temperatures under 1.5C. (Image: Climate Action Tracker)
New Zealand is also subsidising high greenhouse gas emissions industries by giving the agricultural sector a 100% discount (Image: Nature journal)
We can’t just sit around and wait to see what will happen next. We need positive action.
I’ve read a lot of Climate Adaptation Plans and Strategies over the past the last few years, but He Toka Tū Moana Mō Maketū (Maketū Climate Change Adaptation Plan) is hand-down the best. It’s clearly laid out, outlines the community’s priorities, and can readily serve as a template to help every community around Aoteara develop their own Climate Adaptation Plans. Most important of all:
It’s iwi led, community driven, it’s a plan that’s been decided by those who live here. – Elva Conroy, Kaitohotohu / Facilitator (Video; to listen Watch on Youtube)
In the words of the Maketu Iwi Collective, ‘we will be resilient like the anchor stone Takaparore – strong and steadfast against the elements and tides of change and uncertainty. Regardless of what happens as a result of a changing environment, we will remain standing’. – New Zealand Planning Institute, April 2023.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) synthesis report recently landed with an authoritative thump, giving voice to hundreds of scientists endeavouring to understand the unfolding calamity of global heating. What’s changed since the last one in 2014? Well, we’ve dumped an additional third of a trillion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere, primarily from burning fossil fuels. While world leaders promised to cut global emissions, they have presided over a 5% rise.
The new report evokes a mild sense of urgency, calling on governments to mobilise finance to accelerate the uptake of green technology. But its conclusions are far removed from a direct interpretation of the IPCC’s own carbon budgets (the total amount of CO₂ scientists estimate can be put into the atmosphere for a given temperature rise).
The report claims that, to maintain a 50:50 chance of warming not exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, CO₂ emissions must be cut to “net-zero” by the “early 2050s”. Yet, updating the IPCC’s estimate of the 1.5°C carbon budget, from 2020 to 2023, and then drawing a straight line down from today’s total emissions to the point where all carbon emissions must cease, and without exceeding this budget, gives a zero CO₂ date of 2040.
A full description of the above chart is available here.
If emissions stay at their current levels, we will exhaust the 50% chance of 1.5°C in 9 years. If we begin to immediately cut emissions following the blue line, then to stay within the carbon budget for 50:50 chance of not exceeding 1.5°C we need zero global emissions by 2040. The vertical axis represents how much carbon is emitted each year – note the pandemic-related blip in 2020.
Given it will take a few years to organise the necessary political structures and technical deployment, the date for eliminating all CO₂ emissions to remain within 1.5°C of warming comes closer still, to around the mid-2030s. This is a strikingly different level of urgency to that evoked by the IPCC’s “early 2050s”. Similar smoke and mirrors lie behind the “early 2070s” timeline the IPCC conjures for limiting global heating to 2°C.
IPCC science embeds colonial attitudes
For over two decades, the IPCC’s work on cutting emissions (what experts call “mitigation”) has been dominated by a particular group of modellers who use huge computer models to simulate what may happen to emissions under different assumptions, primarily related to price and technology. I’ve raised concerns before about how this select cadre, almost entirely based in wealthy, high-emitting nations, has undermined the necessary scale of emission reductions.
In 2023, I can no longer tiptoe around the sensibilities of those overseeing this bias. In my view, they have been as damaging to the agenda of cutting emissions as Exxon was in misleading the public about climate science. The IPCC’s mitigation report in 2022 did include a chapter on “demand, services and social aspects” as a repository for alternative voices, but these were reduced to an inaudible whisper in the latest report’s influential summary for policymakers.
The specialist modelling groups (referred to as Integrated Assessment Modelling, or IAMs) have successfully crowded out competing voices, reducing the task of mitigation to price-induced shifts in technology – some of the most important of which, like so-called “negative emissions technologies”, are barely out of the laboratory.
The IPCC offers many “scenarios” of future low-carbon energy systems and how we might get there from here. But as the work of academic Tejal Kanitkar and others has made clear, not only do these scenarios prefer speculative technology tomorrow over deeply challenging policies today (effectively a greenwashed business-as-usual), they also systematically embed colonial attitudes towards “developing nations”.
With few if any exceptions, they maintain current levels of inequality between developed and developing nations, with several scenarios actually increasing the levels of inequality. Granted, many IAM modellers strive to work objectively, but they do so within deeply subjective boundaries established and preserved by those leading such groups.
If we step outside the rarefied realm of IAM scenarios that leading climate scientist Johan Rockström describes as “academic gymnastics that have nothing to do with reality”, it’s clear that not exceeding 1.5°C or 2°C will require fundamental changes to most facets of modern life.
Starting now, to not exceed 1.5°C of warming requires 11% year-on-year cuts in emissions, falling to nearer 5% for 2°C. However, these global average rates ignore the core concept of equity, central to all UN climate negotiations, which gives “developing country parties” a little longer to decarbonise.
Include equity and most “developed” nations need to reach zero CO₂ emissions between 2030 and 2035, with developing nations following suit up to a decade later. Any delay will shrink these timelines still further.
Most IAM models ignore and often even exacerbate the obscene inequality in energy use and emissions, both within nations and between individuals. As the International Energy Agency recently reported, the top 10% of emitters accounted for nearly half of global CO₂ emissions from energy use in 2021, compared with 0.2% for the bottom 10%. More disturbingly, the greenhouse gas emissions of the top 1% are 1.5 times those of the bottom half of the world’s population.
So where does this leave us? In wealthier nations, any hope of arresting global heating at 1.5 or 2°C demands a technical revolution on the scale of the post-war Marshall Plan. Rather than relying on technologies such as direct air capture of CO₂ to mature in the near future, countries like the UK must rapidly deploy tried-and-tested technologies.
Retrofit housing stock, shift from mass ownership of combustion-engine cars to expanded zero-carbon public transport, electrify industries, build new homes to Passivhaus standard, roll-out a zero-carbon energy supply and, crucially, phase out fossil fuel production.
Three decades of complacency has meant technology on its own cannot now cut emissions fast enough. A second, accompanying phase, must be the rapid reduction of energy and material consumption.
Given deep inequalities, this, and deploying zero-carbon infrastructure, is only possible by re-allocating society’s productive capacity away from enabling the private luxury of a few and austerity for everyone else, and towards wider public prosperity and private sufficiency.
For most people, tackling climate change will bring multiple benefits, from affordable housing to secure employment. But for those few of us who have disproportionately benefited from the status quo, it means a profound reduction in how much energy we use and stuff we accumulate.
The question now is, will we high-consuming few make (voluntarily or by force) the fundamental changes needed for decarbonisation in a timely and organised manner? Or will we fight to maintain our privileges and let the rapidly changing climate do it, chaotically and brutally, for us?
“Our wise and noble leaders have just concluded the 27th annual global climate conference known as COP27. They all seem jolly pleased with what they’d all decided to achieve including really very sincere commitment to work super-duper hard to put in place policy that would definitely address the idea of thinking about doing things that might contribute towards the possibility of reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the aim of maybe limiting global temperatures to only 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Then there were the 636 lobbyists—I mean delegates at COP27—representing the fossil fuel industry who reassured us all that increasing oil and gas exploration was actually an extremely important part of the transition toward achieving the 1.5 degrees Celsius target.”
This is a submission on behalf of the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) on the Government’s Discussion Document Te Tātai utu o nā tukunga: Pricing Agricultural Emissions.
The submission responds to the schedule of questions included in the discussion document, reproduced in full with permission from Gary Taylor Chief Executive, Environmental Defence Society:
Question 1:Do you think modifications are required to the proposed farm-level levy system to ensure it delivers sufficient reductions in gross emissions from the agriculture sector? Please explain.
If farmers are to balk at the proposal as indicated by recent statements from Federated Farmers and others, and widespread non-compliance follows, then implementing a processor-level system would be a practical way forward. It is alarming how some farmers are signalling an unwillingness to comply with the rule of law. The farm-level option (which has benefits in sending price signals to individual famers) may therefore not be workable at least in the short term. Processors could develop their own incentive arrangements for their suppliers and some have experience in doing that already.
Question 2:Are tradeable methane quotas an option the Government should consider further in the future? Why?
There may be benefit in seeing the levy system as a transition to a cap and trade system. This means the levy system should be designed so that such a transition could occur. The cap should be set (and reviewed from time to time) by the Climate Change Commission (Commission) at the level that achieves the reduction targets. If Ministers were to make the decisions, then there should be transparent criteria in place, and they should be advised on the appropriate level by the Commission.
Question 3: Which option do you prefer for pricing agricultural emissions by 2025 and why?
A farm-level levy system, with fertiliser in the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), would give individual farmers incentives to reduce emissions and reward those doing so. However, that may be an impractical option given that some farmers seem determined to not cooperate with any system. For that reason, we favour a pragmatic approach where pricing is set at the processor level, which would help avoid non-compliance. Processors could then develop incentives that would apply to their supplier cohort. There are also questions around whether a farm-level system could be developed in time.
Prices should be set either directly by the Commission, or if by Ministers, on the advice of the Commission and subject to transparent criteria.
Fertiliser should come under the ETS which would mean all fertiliser users are captured and the price signal applies across the sector.
Question 4:Do you support the proposed approach for reporting of emissions? Why, and what improvements should be considered?
Broadly yes but further work is needed to simplify the reporting system and ensure the obligations are proportional to the need.
Question 5:Do you support the proposed approach to setting levy prices? Why, and what improvements should be considered?
Price setting cannot be the responsibility of the sector itself. It must be independent and linked to the methane reductions required. As mentioned above, EDS favours this responsibility resting with the independent Commission (analogous to the Reserve Bank on interest rates). But if set by Ministers, then there should be clear decision-making criteria, and they should receive advice from the Commission. Further, the proposed ETS discount rates for long-lived gases are too generous given the persistent delays in bringing the sector into a pricing mechanism.
Question 6:Do you support the proposed approach to revenue recycling? Why, and what improvements should be considered?
Recycling revenue into finding new abatement approaches makes sense in theory, but the problem is that over $100m of public money has gone down that route since the early 2000s, with very little to show for it. If revenue is to go into research it needs to be to entities that offer prospect of deployment of real technologies into the field. Research criteria therefore need to focus on deployment.
The answer to emissions mitigation is to reduce land use intensity. Some compensation for that might also be needed given the farming sector has simply been following the economic signals to date. There is virtue in the model of low-impact pastoral farming with indigenous forestry, and recycling could support that kind of transition.
The big gap in the policy settings, at present, is the lack of strong and effective incentives for indigenous afforestation. Revenue recycling should be used to create such incentives, given the longer term sequestration and biodiversity benefits that would follow.
Further consideration should be given to whether revenue from the levy should also be used to support farmers needing assistance with adaptation crises on the farm (such as droughts and floods).
Question 7:Do you support the proposed approach for incentive payments to encourage additional emissions reductions? Why, and what improvements should be considered?
The price signals should be robust enough to incentivise the emission reductions required. Otherwise the sector is getting disproportional assistance / subsidies from the Government over other sectors.
Question 8:Do you support the proposed approach for recognising carbon sequestration from riparian plantings and management of indigenous vegetation, both in the short and long term? Why, and what improvements should be considered?
Two approaches are required here.
The first is to create a biodiversity incentive payment to support native forest and related plantings or regeneration. The proposed interim approach will achieve that, in part, but biodiversity enhancements need to be considered in the broader context and be designed to encourage and support native forest restoration at landscape scale.
The second is to ban permanent exotic carbon forests in the ETS.
The first approach can help support related government policies such as the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity. The second would prevent widespread monocultures with their attendant adverse landscape impacts and fire and disease risks.
Question 9:Do you support the introduction of an interim processor-level levy in 2025 if the farm-level system is not ready? If not, what alternative would you propose to ensure agricultural emissions pricing starts in 2025?
Yes. In fact we think that should be the way forward in any event.
Question 10:Do you think the proposed system for pricing agricultural emissions is equitable, both within the agriculture sector, and across other sectors, and across New Zealand generally? Why and what changes to the system would be required to make it equitable?
It is time that the sector played its part in mitigating the impacts of climate change. It has got away with too much, for too long, and continuing taxpayer subsidy and support and the proposed incremental nature of the pricing obligations continue that approach. It is inequitable for the primary sector to be relying on others which are paying their way through the ETS.
With respect to Māori landowners, there may be a case for some interim support given they appear to be disproportionately impacted by the proposal. The best way to do that is to create a special category in the ETS for native forest regeneration and establishment that gives a long-term revenue stream as good as or better than permanent exotic carbon forests.
Question 11:In principle, do you think the agricultural sector should pay for any shortfall in its emissions reductions? If so, do you think using levy revenue would be an appropriate mechanism for this?
Yes and that calculation should be made by the Commission.
Question 12:What impacts or implications do you foresee as a result of each of the Government’s proposals in the short and long term?
Unless the Government’s proposals are enacted, we see widespread planting of permanent exotic carbon forests and rural non-compliance with the law. There will be some emission reductions, but the sector will continue to hold out on meeting its fair share, as it has since 2002. The climate will continue to warm with consequent droughts, floods and sea-level rise and farmers will continue to hold out their hands for Government support when impacted.
Question 13:What steps should the Crown be taking to protect relevant iwi and Māori interests, in line with Te Tiriti o Waitangi? How should the Crown support Māori land owners, farmers and growers in a pricing system?
By changing the pricing incentives to favour permanent native forests over permanent exotic ones. Māori landowners have indicated a preference for natives but the pricing incentives are going the wrong way.
Question 14:Do you support the proposed approach for verification, compliance and enforcement? Why, and what improvements should be considered?
Yes.
Question 15:Do you have any other priority issues that you would like to share on the Government’s proposals for addressing agricultural emissions?
The glaring gap is the absence of the right pricing incentives to encourage native forest restoration that would lead to a virtuous mixed land use in which native forests offset some on-farm emissions over time.
“We asked banks to identify the value of their mortgage exposures that would be affected by permanent sea level rises of 20 centimetres, 50 centimetres and 1 metre in the most severe case. This range of sea level rise is consistent with climate change modelling out from 2040 to 2100.”
A sea level rise of just 1 metre (the banks’ ‘most severe case’) by 2100 is entirely inconsistent with real world events now unfolding. COP27 was an abysmal failure. Emissions are increasing instead of decreasing. Greenland is decanting into the ocean, along with most of our mountain glaciers, and even parts of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which was assumed to be stable for thousands of years, are showing signs of destablising (Video 2), while…
‘Sections of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may collapse even without further emissions, causing more than 4 meters of additional sea-level rise…’ – State of the Cryosphere 2022 (p8)
State of the Cryosphere Forward Pam Pearson Director, ICCI
Far too much human suffering occurred in 2022 due to rapid loss of ice in the cryosphere, Earth’s snow and ice regions, from human-caused global warming.
Most occurred in places far from ice and snow: coastal sea-level rise from ice sheet loss; water shortages well downstream from shrinking glaciers and snowpack; floods, avalanches, wildfires and extreme weather events.
All were caused in whole or in part by loss of the cryosphere’s stabilizing influence on the global climate system. Our global ice stores are receding at rates unthinkable just a decade ago, whether held in ice sheets, land glaciers, permafrost or sea ice.
This State of the Cryosphere Report 2022: Growing Losses, Global Impacts especially raises up the IPCC Sixth Assessment conclusion that complete loss of Arctic sea ice in summer is now inevitable, even with the very lowest emissions pathways that peak temperatures at 1.6°C. This finding is a terminal diagnosis for that ecosystem and its essential role reflecting sunlight as the “Earth’s refrigerator,” something sea ice scientists have been warning for decades would come with continued high emissions. No one seems to have listened.
But the impending loss of Arctic summer sea ice it is not the only sign of growing cryosphere collapse. This year also saw March rains on East Antarctica, with temperatures 40°C above normal; a spike in Greenland surface melt for the first time ever in September; loss of over 5% of glacier ice in the Alps over a single summer; and the first documented rise in methane release due to global warming from a permafrost monitoring site. It also saw greater shell damage in parts of the Arctic Ocean, a clear sign of acidification; and an apparent crash in snow crab populations likely tied to warming waters.
Research published this year also shows growing convergence between ice sheet models and what paleo-climatologists (those who study Earth history going back millions of years) have warned for decades: that ice loss and irreversible sea-level rise may be occurring faster, and at lower temperatures than previously forecast: even from the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet, with temperatures above 1.8°C. Nearly all these impacts are irreversible on human timescales. It might take only decades to melt a glacier, but centuries to thousands of years of lower temperatures to grow it back.
The message from the global cryosphere in 2022 is that we are already well into the risk zone for irreversible damage from continued loss of the planet’s global ice stores. Nevertheless, the 2022 UNFCCC Synthesis Report on reported pledges (NDCs) showed not the 45% decrease in emissions needed by 2030 to keep 1.5°C within reach, but a 10% increase by 2030.
Our planet’s melting ice pays no attention to climate pledges and NDCs. It responds only to the level of CO2 and warming in the atmosphere. In 2022, the year-on-year increase of about 2.5 ppm continued unabated, as it has for the past two decades. Until this CO2 rise slows, halts and begins to decrease, the ice will continue to respond as it always has: to the only number that really matters.
Since COP26, the ‘Don’t-Look-Up’ mentality, or perhaps the ‘war-in-Ukraine’ and ‘post-Covid-economy’ have become diversionary topics. The latest UN GAP Report begins with a clear admission, and an admonition. Nations have shaved just 1% off their projected greenhouse gas emissions for 2030, at a time when reductions need to be 45% to have even a chance to keep temperatures under 1.5C. In short, there is no credible no credible pathway in which global temperatures under that 2.8C, and “...uncertainties in the climate system mean that warming of up to 4C cannot be fully ruled out.”
If you’re not up to reading the full report, Carbon Brief has an in depth analysis. While the report also offers solutions, the window is closing on fingernails barely clinging to the sill.
Look up.
Please.
“Every year, the negative impacts of climate change become more intense. Every year, they bring more misery and pain to hundreds of millions of people across the globe. Every year, they become more a problem of the here and now, as well as a warning of tougher consequences to come. We are in a climate emergency.
“And still, as UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2022 shows, nations procrastinate. Since COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, new and updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) have barely impacted the temperatures we can expect to see at the end of this century.
“This year’s report tells us that unconditional NDCs point to a 2.6°C increase in temperatures by 2100, far beyond the goals of the Paris Agreement. Existing policies point to a 2.8°C increase, highlighting a gap between national commitments and the efforts to enact those commitments. In the best- case scenario, full implementation of conditional NDCs, plus additional net zero commitments, point to a 1.8°C rise. However, this scenario is currently not credible.
“To get on track to limiting global warming to 1.5°C, we would need to cut 45 per cent off current greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. For 2°C, we would need to cut 30 per cent. A stepwise approach is no longer an option. We need system-wide transformation. This report tells us how to go about such a transformation. It looks in-depth at the changes needed in electricity supply, industry, transport, buildings and food systems. It looks at how to reform financial systems so that these urgent transformations can be adequately financed.
“Is it a tall order to transform our systems in just eight years? Yes. Can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions by so much in that timeframe? Perhaps not. But we must try. Every fraction of a degree matters: to vulnerable communities, to species and ecosystems, and to every one of us. Most importantly, we will still be setting up a carbon-neutral future: one that will allow us to bring down temperature overshoots and deliver other benefits, like clean air.
“The world is facing other crises. We must deal with them. But let us remember that they also offer opportunities to reform our global economy. We have missed the opportunity to invest in a low-carbon recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, we are in danger of missing the opportunity to boost clean and efficient energy as a response to the energy crisis. Instead of missing such opportunities, we must capitalize on them with confidence.
“I urge every nation and every community to pore over the solutions offered in this report, build them into their NDCs and implement them. I urge everyone in the private sector to start reworking their practices. I urge every investor to put their capital towards a net-zero world. The transformation begins now. ”
This is fast emerging as a critical issue for billions of people. As part of its week-long series on the topic, Carbon Brief hosted a free webinar (video below) on whether it is likely to be the defining issue at the next round of UN climate talks, COP27.
