Newsroom’s Rod Oram is in the UK ahead of the COP26 conference in Glasgow. Here he speaks to British climate leader Sir Jonathon Porritt about New Zealand’s failing leadership on methane.
New Zealand’s international reputation on climate issues is falling because of its very weak targets for methane reduction, it’s “long stream of missed opportunities” on policies, and its failure to capitalise on its abundant advantages such as renewable electricity, says Sir Jonathon Porritt, the British climate leader who chairs Air New Zealand’s Sustainability Advisory Panel.
“I don’t think anyone would put New Zealand in the leadership cohort right now. In fact, I’m not sure they really know where to put New Zealand at all,” he said in a wide-ranging interview with Newsroom in the UK.
New Zealand is “massively on the back foot” on methane, given the emphasis several UN reports this year have put on the need to sharply cut the short-lived but highly potent greenhouse gas to help slow down the rise in global temperatures.
Listen to Rod Oram’s full interview with Jonathon Porritt, below
In response to the reports, the US and EU have called for a 30 percent reduction in methane emissions by 2030, which is three times New Zealand’s current target. At the UN’s COP26 climate negotiations beginning in Scotland in two weeks’ time, they will urge other countries to sign up to their methane reduction alliance.
Porritt also expressed concern that New Zealand has yet to announce an increase in its UN climate commitments. Under the 2015 Paris agreement, every country is legally obliged to “ratchet up” its Nationally Determined Contribution before COP26. New Zealand is among a number of countries that have missed the deadline or have merely reiterated their existing NDC (Nationally determined contribution).
Moreover, countries are meant to revise their NDCs “in the light of the science as it exists at the time”. Porritt said. But our Climate Change Commission gave its advice to the Government on carbon budgets, pathways and the NDC before the UN produced its latest climate report. That report, though, significantly hardened key climate assessments such as the rate of sea level rise and global heating.
Government and business are not “squeezing enough carbon out of the New Zealand economy fast enough”, he said.
“It’s extremely unlikely the carbon budgets proposed by the Commission are going to set New Zealand on a course to net zero.”
At COP26 and after, Porritt expects to see a much greater emphasis on changes in land use, farming and food production to help tackle the climate crisis. “We need to accelerate the solutions that are already available to us.”
“We’re going to see much more civil disobedience, with many more people saying ‘Enough, this isn’t tolerable … you’re continuing to trash the prospects of young people today by failing to recognise their needs for the future’.”
– Sir Jonathon Porritt
He was also highly critical of the way many governments, in the UK and elsewhere, are failing to work effectively with their societies to develop climate solutions. In particular, they are failing to co-create with them policies that deliver social, economic, health and wider environmental co-benefits.
“Civil society is going to become increasingly intolerant of government shortfalls in these areas. If people see emissions creeping up, year after year, notwithstanding all of these promises that we’re going to start coming down, they’re going to realise that this is just completely vacuous dishonesty,” he said.
“We’re going to see much more civil disobedience, with many more people saying ‘Enough, this isn’t tolerable … you’re continuing to trash the prospects of young people today by failing to recognise their needs for the future’.”
