This is the decade than humankind will determine its future by the decisions it makes, Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican climate diplomat who chaired the Paris climate agreement, told a New Zealand audience this week.
If humankind doesn’t reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent by 2030, she said, we stand no chance of keeping the rise in global temperature to 1.5C. We will fail to halt the escalating climate crisis, as she laid out in her recent book The Future We Choose.
So, we need to be honest about the trade-offs and choices we make; and taking inadequate or no action is a choice in itself. Figueres, who the Hillary Institute recently made its 10th Laureate for her climate leadership, called for “stubborn optimism” to face the inevitable setbacks and disappointments along the way.
But with this very sobering message she also delivered to the Auckland audience great encouragement about the commitments countries are making. The EU, Japan, China and Korea among major economies, and New Zealand among small ones, have pledged to reach net zero emission by mid-century; and President-elect Joe Biden has said he will add the US’s pledge as one of his first actions when he takes office on January 20.
Figueres’ presentation, in a recording from her Costa Rican home, opened the Climate Change and Business conference in Auckland, the 13th organised by the Environmental Defence Society. As with all of the previous ones since the series began in the early 2000s, the 450 or so delegates came from a wide cross-section of the country – from politics and business, from civil society and NGOs.
But the tone of this year’s conference was markedly different in urgency and ambition from past ones. Every speaker and delegate, knew the next 12 months are absolutely critical for New Zealand’s response to the climate crisis.
Almost certainly, the new goal will be a maximum rise of 1.5C rise in temperatures. Beyond that limit, deeply damaging changes in climate will accelerate, making it ever harder for humankind to adapt to severe changes in Earth systems.
Next February, the Climate Change Commission with propose drafts of the country’s first three five-year carbon budgets, each smaller than its predecessor, and the proposed policies and sector pathways which will set us on the road to meeting our legislated goal of net zero emissions by 2050. Following public consultation, these will be revised and submitted to government, which has until the end of the year to decide what it will commit the country to.
Next November, we will join all other nations of the world at the United Nation’s next climate negotiations, which the UK is hosting in Glasgow with Italy as the co-chair. Under the 2015 Paris agreement, each country is required to increase its commitment to emissions reduction in response to the escalating climate crisis.
Almost certainly, the new goal will be a maximum rise of 1.5C rise in temperatures. Beyond that limit, deeply damaging changes in climate will accelerate, making it ever harder for humankind to adapt to severe changes in Earth systems.
Our Paris commitment was consistent with a global temperature rise of 3C, according to analysis of Carbon Action Tracker. So we will have to take a far more ambitious pledge to Glasgow.
By the end of next year, our government is required by our zero carbon act to have made its decisions on the carbon budgets and reductions pathways out to 2035. By then, we will have had to reduce our emissions by at least 60 percent if we are to meet our 2050 goal of net zero emissions.
Climate Change Minister James Shaw and Environment Minister David Parker laid out to the conference the whole-of-government approach to these enormous challenges in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s second term of government.
This ranges across the great complexities of our climate response, to big reforms of the RMA and other legislation which help address their own fields while helping to underpin emission reductions and our adaptation to the changing climate.
Shaw told the conference that the carbon budgets will require us to make some hard choices. The government’s goal is that by the end of its current term our emissions will start to fall as we begin our multi-decade transition to a net zero emissions economy.
Climate Change Commission chair Rod Carr said cutting emissions from energy use (such as in industrial heat and processes) needed to be the top priority, followed by transport.
Meanwhile the agriculture sector, which accounts for almost half our emissions, is working with the government in a joint forum, He Waka Eke Noa, on how to measure, price and mitigate farm emissions by 2025.
Over the two days of the conference, sessions drilled down into sectors such as transport, food, energy, finance, emissions trading, corporate obligations and responses, forestry, local government, and adaptation to the physical changes climate change is causing such as rising sea levels, increased storm frequency and droughts.
Substantial, recent changes to the Emissions Trading Scheme, such as a cap on emissions, and the introduction of an auction system next year, will significantly improve its effectiveness as a way to price carbon and thus incentivise emissions reduction.
But the united view of delegates was that the ETS alone won’t drive the changes we need. We need a comprehensive range of policies, programmes, strategies and other responses by central and local government, businesses, consumers and all other participants in the economy to achieve our climate goals.
Above all there were many powerful expressions through the conference of two great advantages we have in New Zealand in our response to these towering global challenges:
- The innovation and social cohesion we’re showing in our response to the Covid pandemic is giving us greater confidence and ambition in addressing the climate crisis and in achieving sustainability in all it’s the deeply inter-related environmental, economic and social dimensions.
- Maori worldview and knowledge is profoundly informing and inspiring our responses.
Quite simply we are building a future which deeply reflects who we are as a nation, what we are physically as a country, where we are in the South Pacific, and the role we play in the world.
Once the conference presentations are available on the EDS website, I’ll note the URL in a future column. They’re well worth exploring. Disclosure: I was the paid MC of the conference.
