So what is ‘realistic’, minister?

Opinion: Climate Change Minister Simon Watts is in an interesting position. He knows we’re 100 million tonnes of CO2e short of meeting the emissions reductions target we signed up to at the Paris COP in 2015. Known as our Nationally Determined Contribution, this target was designed to keep global temperature rises to 1.5C. It’s due in 2030.
We signed up knowing the only way we could meet the target was by paying another country to do what we couldn’t – reduce emissions – and adding their saved tonnes to our account.
The figure of 1.5C is now tragically out of date. The fact we’re looking at 3C by century’s end ought to have us panic-stricken and trebling our efforts to quit fossil fuels.
But Watts has ruled out buying offshore climate credits. At the Sustainable Business Council’s conference in September on climate change and business he described the suggestion as “unrealistic”.
“We need to do everything possible in order to reduce our domestic emissions at a profile that doesn’t decimate our economy.”
And how much would that be? Scandalously little is the answer. Granted, total annual emissions fell a miniscule 1.8 percent over the year to June 2023 when compared to the previous year. ‘Downward drivers,’ according to Stats NZ, are in electricity, gas, water and waste services. Emissions from transport, postal and warehousing continue to rise – at 38 percent.
We’re not the only ones to fail. The latest World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin showed that all three main greenhouse gases (CO2, methane and nitrous oxide) reached record levels last year. In the past 10 years CO2 has risen 11.4 percent and is now at 420 parts per million.
Consider that figure. And compare it with the figure veteran American campaigner Bill McKibben took for his, now international, climate activist organisation www.350.org.nz. When it was formed in 2008, keeping to 350ppm seemed an achievable goal. If we could stick to that amount – a mere 70ppm above pre-industrial levels of 280ppm – most life on earth would stand a chance.
Consider also the contribution to that increase of Canada’s forest fires last year and the effect of feedback from climate-caused heat and drought. Add to this the recently released evidence of a reduction in the ability of earth’s natural carbon sinks to absorb CO2. Things are getting incrementally worse.
Last week the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change released its 2024 Synthesis Report on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in which it assessed the commitments different nations have made to meet their Paris targets. It found that current NDCs would cut greenhouse gas emissions by a mere 2.6 percent from 2019 levels, a far cry from the 43 percent needed to have a chance of meeting the 1.5C limit by 2030.
“Current NDC plans fall miles short of what’s needed to stop global heating from crippling every economy and wrecking billions of lives and livelihoods across every country,” warns the UN Climate Change Executive secretary Simon Stiell.
Will Watts change his mind? Motu, the economic and public policy research institute based in Wellington, recently held a webinar titled Think globally, act Cooperatively: Progressing Offshore Mitigation for Aotearoa New Zealand. Their work has considerable international standing and their research analyses this issue from multiple aspects.
The paper that preceded the webinar opens with a bias that confounds the minister’s stance. Its lead paragraph says the paper’s aim is to show how we could work with other countries “to accelerate global climate progress, by funding offshore mitigation to help meet (our) 2030 target … The world is off track to prevent dangerous climate change”.
The article’s authors, Catherine Leining, Sasha Maher and Hannah Kotulla, and Suzi Kerr from the Environmental Defence Fund, who presented at the webinar along with Leining and Maher, have got the message. We have to use whatever are the most efficient means to reduce emissions. The catastrophic storms we’ve experienced and the heat waves in the northern summer are just a taste.
Three quarters of the potential for cost-effective mitigation lies in the developing world but these countries currently lack the capability of implementing such changes. Yet historically they have contributed least to the problem.
The Motu paper reminds us that offshore mitigation was always the (controversial) strategy – “… both National- and Labour-led governments deliberately pledged to deliver more ambitious Paris targets than were feasible domestically, intending to meet the difference by funding mitigation in other countries. Successive governments have not yet acted on this pledge …”
Progress on the issue they say, and as Watts realises, is stymied by public outcry each time it surfaces. Our needs at home are many – a new hospital for Dunedin, houses for a growing population. Aren’t we better to fund our own emissions-reducing strategies – upgrade public transport with electric buses? Extend and electrify passenger rail? Etc, etc.
There is a level at which figures have a life of their own and little relationship to reality. In 2020 the then-minister of climate change asked the Climate Change Commission to advise on the compatibility of our NDC with contributing to the global effort under the Paris Agreement. The commission’s final advice decreed our NDC “incompatible with global efforts…”.
The result – New Zealand submitted an updated NDC in November 2021, increasing its target from 30 percent reduction to 50 percent below gross 2005 levels by 2030. The commission: “Offshore mitigation would be required to meet the NDC due to the gap between what could feasibly be achieved domestically and what we must do to meet the previous or an enhanced NDC.”
Climate Action Tracker notes: “While the updated NDC target purportedly strengthens the 2030 target by 20 percentage points, it was based on two misleading accounting methods that more than halve its effective reduction in net emissions to only 22 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.”
These are figures only. Motu’s work cloaks them in the reality they represent – the urgency of survival in what is now more adequately described as a polycrisis. Let’s overcome the divide on offshore mitigation, Motu proposes, by seeing it as an opportunity for Climate Cooperation and use it to complement, not displace, ambitious domestic strategies.
Its benefits include boosting our “credibility in multilateral and trade agreements” and “contributes to global security, equity and prosperity”.
What more could you ask, Minister Watts?