The non-binding nature of the Paris Agreement places the burden on everyday New Zealanders to push the Government to go further and faster on climate change. Marc Daalder reports in the first of a two-part series on climate activism and anxiety.
Analysis: On September 27, 2019, New Zealand hit a crucial threshold.
As part of the global, intergenerational School Strikes for Climate movement, an estimated 175,000 people took to the streets to push for greater climate action.
That figure represented 3.5 percent of the country's population - something of a magic number in protest circles. A famous study of 200 violent revolutions and 100 non-violent social movements by American political scientist Erica Chenoweth found that half of non-violent movements were successful in achieving their aims, compared to just a quarter of violent ones. Crucially, every non-violent movement that mobilised at least 3.5 percent of the population succeeded.
New Zealand was the first country to reach that threshold - and it's no coincidence that the Zero Carbon Act was passed just months later, creating the framework for New Zealand's decarbonisation journey.
READ PART TWO:
* Grappling with dread on the frontlines of the climate fight
"Those massive school strikes in 2019 made a material difference to the outcome," Climate Change Minister and Green Party co-leader James Shaw told Newsroom.
"They happened to be pretty much the month we were making final policy decisions on the Zero Carbon Act. So to have 175,000 people in 40 different towns around the country, that was noticed."
Paris leaves accountability to the public
University of Canterbury political scientist Bronwyn Hayward says this isn't unexpected. While many might assume the Paris Agreement - and the recently-concluded Glasgow Climate Pact - place certain binding requirements on countries to reduce emissions, the actual ambition of each nation's targets is left to its government.
"In order to get an agreement, the parties to the Paris discussions settled on making each individual country's contributions voluntary. While there is pressure to ratchet up every five years their contribution to try and reduce the emissions that are leading to climate change, there isn't a penalty," she said.
"There's no way other than peer and domestic shame that governments will feel ire from their colleagues for not actually stepping up. That was the trade-off for keeping everybody in the room at the time."
That means one of the Paris Agreement's main mechanisms for actually achieving emissions reductions of the scale that scientists say is needed is pressure from the public.
"The Paris Agreement really has externalised the cost of sanctioning and holding the Government to account to the public. And to communities to really follow the issue, to understand what their governments are doing and not doing and to make it really clear what they want their governments to do," Hayward said.
This doesn't have to come in the form of protests - New Zealand is small enough that in-person conversations and advocacy can often push the needle.
"In the end, it has to be socially unacceptable to continue down the path that we are on currently." – Sophie Handford
In his book The Future Earth, climate journalist Eric Holthaus explored different theories of change and looks at how climate advocacy, from protesting to discussing the issue with friends, could tear us away from our current high-carbon path. He recalled a presentation from an environmental psychologist, Christie Manning, to students associated with the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
Manning "told the students that her own research shows that in a world where the vast majority of our elected representatives and other elites in society might privately agree with the climate movement but publicly oppose action, social movements like Sunrise are prime to create rapid change. The most effective way to break through this dissonance, she said, is storytelling, because it personalises the problem and makes it feel more immediate, which physically changes your brain chemistry and is more likely to generate empathy".
"'Your story can change the debate,' said Manning. 'It's uncomfortable, but it's what's asked of us. Speak, and speak publicly with your friends and people in power'."
Holthaus wrote that "demanding systemic change from those in power is by far the most important thing any of us can do to help the climate movement, and what that looks like in practice is having conversations with anyone who will listen about how important this moment is. The technical solutions are important, sure, but they will be encouraged and fed faster by an uprising that demands more."
The burden of pushing for change
Hayward is concerned about the weight of that burden on those most involved in the climate movement.
"That puts enormous pressure, that I worry about, on communities like students and youth protesters, indigenous leaders and indigenous communities, who are already carrying a quite significant burden of both feeling the effects of climate change and anxiety about the changing climate. On top of that, they're also expected to turn up in large numbers and to protest and to make themselves heard and to somehow pressure or lobby their government," she said.
And climate activists spoken to by Newsroom said they feel keenly the burden of having to push, in public and private spheres, for greater action.
"What drove me originally was a sense of fear and a feeling of guilt for how I would feel if I, say in 20 or 30 years' time, looked back and had a conversation with my future children about the state of our world and had to say that I did nothing when I knew it was a crisis that we were in the midst of," Sophie Handford said.
Now a Kāpiti Coast district councillor, Handford was still in high school when she organised the 2019 school strikes rallies, including the massive September one that hit the 3.5 percent threshold.
She saw that same paralysing fear in others her age as well, but has since come to a different way of looking at her mission.
"The School Strikes for Climate hopefully started to change that narrative, in that we do have power together. If we have a vision for something that's better, actually it's going to need all of our voices coming together through hope and love for our planet and for what we do actually want to pass on to the next generation."
Activists for Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa also feel they have a role to play in pushing the Government to do more on climate. In the last week of October, as the Glasgow climate summit loomed, members from all over the country gathered in Wellington for a week of coordinated actions.
"At Parliament, we want to speak directly to parliamentarians who are making decisions," Cally O'Neill, who was part of a group that glued themselves to Parliament, told Newsroom.
"We're really wanting to send our message to the people who are causing the problems and who are able to make the changes."
Jen Olsen, of Extinction Rebellion's Dunedin chapter, wasn't hopeful that enough would be done.
"Attitudes are changing. I personally don't think quickly enough. The fact that they can't agree to any binding statements is just so disheartening. If they carried out all the stuff they agreed at Paris, we'd be better off than we are now, but even that's not good enough."
It takes two to tango
It wasn't until the end of 2019 and the huge turnout in September that Handford said she really moved from a place of despair to a place of hope. But seeing how many people ditched work and school to push for climate action was heartening - and so was the sense that the protests had made a difference.
"In the end, it has to be socially unacceptable to continue down the path that we are on currently. Business-as-usual has to become unacceptable in the eyes of the public. But also we have to have visionary leadership coming from those in power."
For Handford, the path to climate action takes two to tango. Protesters help demonstrate that there is a mandate for change and convert others to the cause, but progress won't happen if politicians and business leaders don't take advantage of that mandate to embark on a bold and ambitious decarbonisation programme.
"If we are creating the public and social mandate for our leaders to do something big and bold - which who knows if it might be what they're dreaming of, but they feel like they need the backing of Aotearoa - if we can help to create that and if we can tango alongside them, then we're so up for that. There's so much at stake that we're willing to be involved however we need to, to make sure that we see the moves that are necessary."
Shaw agrees with Handford's view of the mutual relationship between leaders and protesters.
"You need to ensure that you've got social licence for the change programme," he said.
"The executive needs to feel that it's got the support to do what needs to be done. So having an active Opposition against climate action, which there is, makes things harder."
Advocacy from the public can help outweigh that opposition.
"You've got 20,000 people arguing against climate action here and 175,000 arguing for it over here."
Part two, which looks at how the activists, ministers and scientists on the frontlines of the fight against climate change cope with feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, is now available.
