Faced with a nuclear threat in the Pacific, New Zealand matched its rhetoric with action. David Williams reports
The document had the bland title: ‘Request for the indication of interim measures of protection’. It was 1973 and Prime Minister Norman Kirk’s government, side-by-side with Australia, was taking proceedings against France in the International Court of Justice, in Geneva, over atmospheric nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll.
“In the last two years, this question has, in New Zealand, assumed the proportions of a dominating political issue, requiring constant and extensive coverage in the daily press and in other news media,” said the court request, which asked for a moratorium on testing while the case was considered.
“There has been intense activity by private individuals and groups to impress upon the New Zealand Government their anxiety about the tests.”
Concern was raised about environmental contamination from further nuclear testing. The South Pacific has special significance, the government stated as the region “is as yet relatively free from the pollution seriously affecting many other parts of the world”.
The court ordered France not to conduct tests causing radioactive fallout on New Zealand and Australian territory until it had ruled – rulings France ignored. New Zealand sent two navy frigates into the test area with a Cabinet minister, Fraser Colman, aboard. They witnessed two tests.
But the following year, with the election of a new president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the tests were ordered underground.
Relying on France’s public statements that it wouldn’t carry out further atmospheric testing, the Geneva-based court decided the case’s point was now moot.
In New Zealand, and in the eyes of many around the world, it was seen as something of a victory; a taking of the moral high ground, at least.
“New Zealand got a huge amount of recognition for being a bit of a David against the Goliath of nuclear weapons,” says retired professor Kevin Clements, who was the foundation director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at University of Otago.
Former prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer says the country was perceived as having an independent foreign policy, and not kowtowing to major powers.
(Palmer was appointed an ad hoc judge when New Zealand went to the Hague again in 1995, after France announced the resumption of underground testing in the South Pacific.)
Most prominently, there was the 1980s ban on nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships, which led to the country’s ejection from ANZUS. This decades-long involvement in anti-nuclear diplomacy and politics has now been bookended by the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed and ratified by New Zealand just this year.
This historical context circles back to how climate change has been framed in New Zealand.
In 2017, at Labour’s election campaign launch, new leader Jacinda Ardern declared climate change as “my generation’s nuclear-free moment”.
At the state opening of Parliament in November of that year, the freshly anointed Prime Minister said she would lead a government of transformation – which will “protect the environment and take action on climate change”. Her government would aspire to “become world leaders on environmental issues and climate change”.
Four years later, Climate Change Minister James Shaw will jet to Glasgow with his tail between his legs, as New Zealand – an acknowledged laggard on climate change action – delivers a heavily criticised emissions reduction target at COP26.
Certainly nuclear weapons are a simpler threat to understand than climate change. But some might be asking, where are the international legal cases, the sabre-rattling, the attempts to lead the world in international agreements?
New Zealand declared a climate emergency but where is the urgency?
Nexus of nukes and climate
Dr Kennedy Graham, a former diplomat, MP, and United Nations official, has a unique view of the nexus between nuclear issues and climate.
He devoted the first half of his career – including 17 years in the Foreign Ministry – to nuclear disarmament. His doctoral thesis was: ‘Nuclear-free zones as an arms control measure’.
After becoming a Green Party list MP in 2008, he worked increasingly on climate issues, attending UN climate conferences in Copenhagen in 2009, and Paris in 2015.
“I think we could say that we got an A in terms of nuclear disarmament,” Graham says.
He withholds the top grade because of what he calls a relaxation of the ban on nuclear warships. Also, at the United Nations, New Zealand voted against nuclear-free resolutions because of political criticism or opposition to the particular countries proposing them.
When it comes to climate policy, however, “at best we get a C”.
Historically, the country’s deal at the 1997 Kyoto climate summit was to bring emissions back to 1990 levels. Our commitments were achieved largely through forest planting (and some dodgy offshore carbon credits) which, Graham says, were motivated by commercial gain rather than climate policy.
The country started to lag when agriculture was continually excluded from the emissions trading scheme, while government policies actively encouraged more intensive agricultural development and irrigation. (To be fair, transport emissions have risen more quickly.)
Gross greenhouse gas emissions – meaning before accounting for offsets – rose 26 percent between 1990 and 2019.
The Ardern-led Government has enacted decent climate legislation, and created the Climate Change Commission, Graham says. And its latest emissions reduction target – nationally determined contribution, under the Paris agreement – is a big step forward.
But climate experts say the commitments are mid-pack and that’s not good enough.
Fairness dictates New Zealand’s historic emissions, and, even now, our high emissions per person, should lead to a much stronger promised reduction. Between 2021 and 2030, New Zealand has promised to reduce emissions by 146 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2e). But about two thirds of that will come from offshore – through buying carbon credits, or working with other countries on emissions-reducing projects like planting trees or shutting coal plants.
Graham says the NDC’s message to the world is New Zealand wants to buy its way out of trouble; that it’s unable or unwilling to make cuts that other countries are making.
“It’s a big step forward, the latest NDC upgrade [but] it isn’t as rigorous as we have been consistently with our nuclear policies since the 1980s.”
Bid for popular support
Clements, formerly of University of Otago, says New Zealand might not be leading the world on climate action, but it could be.
“We could be leading the world on renewables, on solar, on windfarming, harnessing the sea – all kinds of things we could and should be doing to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels for our own energy.”
A big handbrake, perhaps, is the lack of public support. “At its heyday, we had 82 percent of the population in favour of NZ being nuclear free and banning nuclear powered warships.
“I don’t think you’d find 82 percent of the population wanting or willing to do that much on climate change.”
He hopes the Government can stimulate and encourage climate action in neighbourhoods and communities. “It would be really great if we could have groups and organisations and movements up and down the country, doing what we did during the anti-nuclear movement.”
Clements says action on climate is vital because of the damage it will do – and is already doing, with record temperatures fuelling bushfires visible from space, and more intense storms. “We’ve really got to make sure it’s a priority.”
Graham, the former Green MP, who’s a senior associate at Victoria University of Wellington’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, says New Zealand seems to have averted its gaze from the 2030 target, he says, despite declaring a climate emergency.
“The definition of emergencies is you take immediate action. By definition.”
He adds: “The only way you’re cut 2030 is by cutting your methane.”
In a working paper published by the institute in July, Graham notes the Paris Agreement called for countries to pursue targets of the highest possible ambition. Yet New Zealand’s net-zero target for 2050 is carbon neutral as opposed to climate neutral, in that the country still expects to emit about 23 Mt CO2e.
Official advice to ministers in 2018 said climate neutrality was “viable but not preferred”.
Much has changed in three years.
In August, a report on the physical science of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the world was experiencing changes – some of them irreversible – unprecedented in hundreds of thousands of years.
Only last week, the UN World Meteorological Organisation warned countries were “way off track” in restricting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average this century – a goal of the Paris Agreement.
The Zero Carbon Act specifically states the Climate Change Commission can recommend a change to the country’s 2050 target if “significant change has occurred”.
“If it’s viable it’s possible,” says Graham, who adds a change to 2050 should precipitate a stronger 2030 target.
Palmer, the former prime minister, describes climate change as “very, very serious” in a world beset by serious problems. “When you’ve got a pandemic raging, as we have with the Covid delta variety, it’s very hard to concentrate on other issues.”
Still, New Zealand has been a laggard on climate change. Palmer says the country needs to get on with it – “time is running out”.
The country took radical action in the early 1970s when faced with the threat of contamination from nuclear bomb testing. The science suggests radical action is required to stave off the worst effects of climate change – including the potential devastation of our Pacific Island neighbours.
The question is: Will this be our nuclear-free moment?
