Analysis: The chickens are coming home to roost.
That’s the clear message from this morning’s progress check from the independent Climate Change Commission on NZ’s progress against its emissions targets – even if it uses many more words, and none quite so explicit, to say so.
In the past year, the chance of hitting our climate targets has shrunk, not grown. While a handful of policies have been announced which could bring down emissions, “reductions from these measures are expected to be relatively small compared to other actions that may increase emissions”.
Climate-friendly policies include extending road user charge exemptions for electric trucks and introducing congestion charging. On the other side of the spectrum, the Govt has committed to an LNG import terminal, ruled out pricing agricultural emissions and prepared to remove vehicle emissions standards.
It’s not hard to see why the climate plan is looking increasingly off-track.
Indeed, of the emissions reductions the Government intends to achieve by the end of the decade, just 18 percent face no significant risks. The majority now face significant risk, up from moderate risk in last year’s monitoring report.
Looking to the carbon budget after that, from 2031 to 2035, and less than 2 percent of the proposed reductions are on track. Even worse, if 100 percent of those planned reductions were on track, NZ would still miss the 2035 target by a mile.
The Climate Commission uses a colour-coded rubric to check the Government’s climate homework. Green is no risk, yellow means moderate, orange is significant and red says policy settings are “insufficient to deliver” the claimed reductions.
Where last year’s report card was a grid of orange and yellow, this year’s is nearly all orange. Then there’s the flashing red light for climate pollution from agriculture, where policy is insufficient to deliver because of last year’s changes to methane targets and pricing plans.
In 2024, the commission reports, emissions stopped decreasing. A jump in electricity emissions due to coal burning in the dry year was offset by a reduction in pollution from industry. Crucially, however, “reductions in industrial emissions are largely due to a drop in production, rather than changes in efficiency, technology or fuel switching”. In other words, this is anything but a managed transition.
To meet NZ’s targets, emissions must actually reduce twice as fast as they did from 2022 to 2025, the commission says. Strip out the Government’s rosy assumptions that the private sector will come to its rescue and slash agricultural emissions without a steer from policy, and NZ may no longer be on track to hit the 2050 emissions target either.
All is not lost. There is still time to turn the ship around – though the longer we wait, the more costly it will be and the fewer options we will have.
Already, if the Government wants to shore up progress against the current emissions budget (running from the start of this year to the end of 2030), it cannot rely on trees to do so. A tree planted today won’t have grown enough in four years to sequester more carbon than its planting stirred up from the soil.
“The time available to correct course is now short. Many emissions reductions depend on decisions made well before the reductions are realised, and some options for the [current] emissions budget are no longer available,” the commission says.
This time last year, the commission advised the Government to work rapidly to ensure its climate plans were fit for purpose. In response, Climate Minister Simon Watts said he’d keep an eye on it, but promised no specific action.
Now, the commission’s language is even more urgent.
For example, it says the Government must act in the next 12 months to ensure it meets its targets. It should “immediately scale up support measures to meet the 2030 biogenic methane target” and start working now to avert a collapse of the carbon market in the 2030s.
How Watts will receive this year’s recommendations is unclear. The political environment is even more hostile to climate policy than before, as the parties of the coalition race to outdo one another in announcing emissions-regressive policy. On the other hand, the risks to actually hitting our targets are growing larger by the day.
What might have been dismissed in years past as an over-abundance of caution on the commission’s part has been borne out as the country’s emissions progress flatlines and projections of future pollution begin to inch upwards. Even the Government’s own upbeat projections show NZ failing to achieve the 2030 methane target and the next carbon budget.
The political dilemma presented in this morning’s report will be a headache for Watts. His best hope is the same as most of his predecessors’ – that he’ll be promoted and someone else will be left with the unenviable job of tending to the roosting chickens.
