Climate summit moves on fuel and food – so what’s eating NZ?

While we watch the world progress, we regress. That’s the blunt message from COP28, the UN’s latest climate negotiations, which concluded this week in Dubai.

The United Arab Emirates Declaration, COP28’s concluding text agreed by 198 countries, included some notable commitments. Some of the ones most relevant to us are:

· To transition away from fossil fuels.

But our new National-led government is determined to increase oil and gas exploration; and to reduce incentives that were speeding our shift to clean transport, such as those to buy EVs.

What we really need, though, are comprehensive, coherent and inter-linked strategies by government, business and society to rise to the major challenges of this energy revolution.  

· To triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency by 2030.

But our new government believes easier resource consents and market drivers will fast-forward the growth of renewables.

Yet, to achieve that we need nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our electricity system from a 20^th century model dominated by gentailers involving large-scale generation, long distance transmission and concentrated market power to a 21^st century one based on local generation, use, trading and storage of renewable sources of electricity.

· To greatly increase investment by the private sector and other sources of finance to accelerate clean technology development and deployment across the economy to ensure beneficial and transformative change.

One crucial step would be to reduce current distortions in the Emissions Trading Scheme, particularly the excessive planting of pine trees.

But the government has postponed a review of the schem.

It has also decided to use money generated by the scheme for personal tax cuts, which will be more likely to increase emissions rather than reduce them.

It would be far more effective to continue to recycle the money back to polluting companies to help them invest in clean technologies. Examples underway so far are projects by New Zealand Steel and some dairy companies to begin switching from fossil fuels to electricity in their product­­ion processes.

· To increase the use of nature-based solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to reverse the damage we’ve done to ecosystems and biodiversity, thereby improving resilience to climate change.

Achieving those triple, inter-connected goals requires significant changes in environmental regulation, land use, forestry, farming and food.

“Even if we phase out all fossil fuels, if we do not get involved in nature we will lose what we have all agreed is the safe future for humanity on Earth – that is, to stay within the 1.5C limit,” says Professor Johan Rockström at COP28. “It’s really decisive, that we get it right with nature.” Rockström is head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the leaders of the influential Planetary Boundaries methodology for assessing humanity’s impact on the planet.

All scientific models showing pathways to the 1.5C goal make big assumptions that we will retain natural carbon sinks, such as forests, wetlands and peatlands, he said. Without these the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase even faster.

Moreover, food systems generate about 30 percent of current human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, while animal products account for almost 60 percent of those, the UN Environment Programme said in its COP28 report “What’s Cooking?”

“There is a need to change the way we produce and consume the food we eat because of its growing impact on climate change, particularly in high- and middle-income countries. While many approaches are available to address the adverse impacts of animal agriculture, this report looks specifically at novel alternatives to conventional animal source food.”

But our new government is following through on its campaign promise to roll back a wide range of recent environmental reforms such as the comprehensive overhaul of the Resource Management Act and freshwater. It has also said it will postpone the minimal efforts on climate the previous Labour-led government was going to require farmers to make.

“A close examination of the new Government’s policies reveals a clear anti-environment bias. They signal a profound retreat from the responsible environmental management of recent Labour and National-led governments,” Gary Taylor, chief executive of the Environmental Defence Society, wrote recently in this Newsroom article.

How is that on such fraught climate issues COP28 could achieve unanimous agreement by 198 governments representing 8 billion people? But in New Zealand one government representing 5.2 million can’t – nor could its predecessors?

Quite simply, there was an intensity of debate, a tsunami of evidence, a profusion of advocates, an electrifying urgency and a grasp of consequences we lack in New Zealand.