Climate Change: No longer on track

When the then-Labour government set our emissions budgets back in 2021, it deliberately set itself a lowball target for the first budget period (2022 - 2025), with the idea that it would be met with business-as-usual. But then Chris Hipkins' policy bonfire happened, and now we're no longer on track:

The Government is no longer on track to meet its first emissions budget in 2025 and will require significant and costly action offshore to hit its first Paris Agreement target in 2030, according to a paper taken to Cabinet by Climate Change Minister James Shaw.

Earlier this year, a board of public service executives charged with executing New Zealand’s climate goals warned the chances of meeting New Zealand’s first budget were “finely balanced”. A later paper from Shaw said officials had since updated their assessment and “determined we are no longer on track to meet EB1 [Emissions Budget 1] through policy impact”.

Officials estimated the country was 1.5 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions short of hitting the emissions reductions required.

The paper also warned that the amount of emissions abatement expected from policy in the second and third emissions budgets had been “substantially downgraded”. The first emissions budget captures the period to 2025, the second captures the next five years to 2030 and the third captures the next five years to 2035.

And of course this also means that we're facing an even larger offshore mitigation liability to meet our Paris NDC.

The government can borrow up to 1% from the next budget to meet the previous one, so it can probably claim legal compliance with a 1.5MT shortfall. But that's obviously not what is meant to happen, and doing it on your first budget will undermine the credibility of the scheme.

We still have time to fix this: the end of 2025 is still two years away, and you can save 1.5 MT in that period (e.g. by shrinking the dairy herd by 375,000 cows). But we will need new policies to replace those burned by Hipkins if we are to meet our targets for the second and third budgets. And unfortunately, the incoming government's plans (cancel everything that is currently working and give farmers another five year holiday on emissions reductions) are going in exactly the wrong direction.