New climate plan: NZ could reach ‘net zero’ 2050 target six years early

Wednesday, 11 December 2024

Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says the Government will reach its “net zero” 2050 commitment - and it can even reach it six years early.

In his first Emissions Reduction Plan (just the second one New Zealand has seen), Watts lays out a vision in which New Zealand’s net emissions, except for agriculture’s methane emissions, reach net zero in 2044.

But sceptics will likely question the plan and whether it is promising more than it can deliver.

In an amendment to the first Emissions Reduction Plan, which had been published by Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw, Watts noted a number of climate projects had been canned recently. Those included the Clean Car Discount and industrial de-carbonisation funding, which made significant contributions to New Zealand’s emission reductions.

Nevertheless, the minister and analysis from the Ministry for the Environment insisted the country was on track to meet its climate promise.

Why it matters

• The coalition Government had been under pressure to explain how it would reach its climate targets, given its decision to cut centrepiece emissions reductions policies from the previous Government. It has also promised to reopen New Zealand to oil and gas exploration, with some ministers - such as Shane Jones - talking up the benefits of mining coal.

• Under world-leading climate legislation, passed in 2019, New Zealand governments are obliged to create and publish plans showing how they will reach the “net zero” 2050 target. That target states all emissions, except for methane, must be net zero by 2050 - while methane should be reduced by 24%.

The breakdown

The new Emissions Reduction Plan said the country was on track to cut emissions thanks largely to renewable electricity investment.

It also planned to plant more trees. Watts said the Government was exploring “private-sector partnerships to plant trees on low-conservation Crown-owned land”.

The Climate Change Commission raised concerns about relying on tree planting, saying in an earlier report that those trees needed to have been planted years ago to make an impact in the short-term.

“Additional forest planting can no longer make much difference to this period, because the rates of increase of carbon removal through trees is slow in the early stages of new plantings,” the commission said in its 2024 report.

The report stressed the important of the Emissions Trading Scheme and restated the coalition’s plan to price agricultural emissions form 2030 - that’s five years later than the Labour-led Government had planned.

Who said what

“New Zealand remains committed to the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. Nine years after the Paris Agreement, commitments by the global community have reduced our trajectory from 4 to 2.7 degrees of warming. But there is more work to do,” Watts said in the plan.

But Labour leader Chris Hipkins questioned if the Government would reach this climate reduction target.

“What we’ve seen from this Government is they pay lip service to the idea of reducing emissions, but they don’t actually want to do anything that might achieve that,” he said.