Risk of NZ missing 2050 ‘net zero’ target has increased — Climate Change Commission

Friday, 25 July 2025

The risk of New Zealand “veering off course” from meeting its 2050 ‘net zero’ carbon emissions target has increased, the Climate Change Commission has warned in an annual monitoring report.

The report, released this morning by Climate Change Minister Simon Watts, said progress was “broadly on track” to the end of this year, but there was a significant risk that would not be the case by 2030.

There was no “back-up” plan if technological innovations that it is hoped may reduce methane emissions from cattle failed, it warned.

Either way, the country would fail to meet its ‘carbon budget’ for the period 2031 to 2035, based on the Government’s current plans, the Climate Change Commission forecast.

Chief executive Jo Hendy said urgent action was needed to get on track.

“Falling short doesn’t just mean missing a target — it means higher costs down the track, lost economic opportunities, and more disruption for communities.

“The current policy settings aren’t enough to deliver the emissions reductions that Aotearoa New Zealand has committed to,” she said.

In a separate development, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague yesterday issued an opinion that failure to take appropriate action to protect the climate from fossil fuel emissions — including “the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences” — could constitute “an internationally wrongful act”, for which countries could at least in theory be held liable.

A Government bill that would lift the current ban on new offshore oil and gas permits is currently awaiting its third reading in Parliament.

Watts described the ICJ’s report as long and complicated and said the Government would study it carefully before commenting on the substance “including around oil and gas policies”.

Green Party climate spokesperson Chlöe Swarbrick said the Government was “actively choosing to inflame climate change, putting our 2050 goals, communities, food growing capacity and financial stability at serious risk”.

“The Climate Change Commission is clear: to meet our climate targets, and ensure a liveable future for all of us, we must act now, across all sectors.”

But the Government’s focus was on “unproven and risky” technologies, such as carbon capture, which the energy industry itself had said made no economic sense, she said.

Labour’s climate change spokesperson Deborah Russell said a Stats NZ report that showed emissions rising 0.9% in the three months to the end of March was “an early signal that something's going wrong in this space”.

Watts needed to take responsibility but “there's a lot of stuff we're not hearing from him about climate”, she said, also noting the opinion released by the ICJ.

Watts said the Government acknowledged more work would be required to meet the third emissions budget ending in 2035.

“This will be the focus of the third emissions reduction plan, which isn’t due until the end of 2029,” he said.

One role of the Climate Change Commission, now chaired by Dame Patsy Reddy, is to provide the annual progress report on emissions reduction, which includes an assessment of the adequacy of the Government’s plans.

Its first such report, published last year under the stewardship of former chair Rod Carr, also warned there was a significant risk New Zealand would miss its carbon emissions targets between 2026 and 2035 without further action.

But the new report goes further by describing the plans for the latter half of that period as insufficient.

A small silver-lining is the earlier report warned meeting the “carbon budget” for the period between 2022 and 2025 was not in the bag due to the risk of rising emissions from electricity generation.

That concern, at least, now seems to have eased.

The commission called in today’s report for “additional targeted policies” to speed up the shift to renewable energy, cleaner transport and low-emissions farming.

It also called for action to strengthen the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) so it could play “an ongoing role in helping cut emissions fast enough”.

“This is a fork-in-the-road moment for Aotearoa New Zealand,” Hendy said.

“Electrifying our ageing, high-cost energy system isn’t just good for the climate, it make economic sense.

“It’s also the best way to address wider issues such as gas supply constraints and volatile petrol prices, while making us less vulnerable to global shocks and natural disasters.”

The commission said the Government had implemented or proposed some policies that could help reduce emissions over the past year.

These included updating some settings of the ETS, “confirming rail capability for new Cook Strait ferries”, streamlining consenting for new renewable electricity generation and suggesting increased tree-planting on Crown-owned land as well as options for carbon capture.

But it said some policies or plans could work in the opposite direction.

Those included introducing road-user charges for EVs, the plan to issue new permits for offshore oil and gas exploration, and winding down New Zealand Green Investment Finance, which had invested in commercial emission-reducing initiatives.

The commission emphasised in the report that action would be needed before 2031 to ensure the carbon budget for the five-year period ending in 2035 could be met.

The Government is targeting an annual reduction in carbon emissions of more than 16 million tonnes during that period through measures that include attempting to capture carbon dioxide in disused gas wells and reducing agricultural emissions.

But the commission assessed there were significant risks to it achieving about 11 million tonnes of those planned annual reductions and an absence of measures to achieve another 2m tonnes, with almost none of the reductions looking a safe bet.

The Government’s plan for reducing emissions from agriculture was heavily weighted towards “technological solutions” to reduce methane emissions from cattle, it warned.

“Should this approach fail, there is no back-up plan and the future impact of emissions reductions may be more severe. More focus on transition to high-value, low-emissions land uses could address this risk.”

There were many viable opportunities for further emissions reduction, it said.

Its suggestions included new measures to encourage industries to move away from gas as an energy source, more incentives for EVs, subsidies for hydrogen refuelling stations for trucks, and additional action to divert organic waste away from landfills.

There was currently little incentive for farmers to act on agricultural emissions but better advice and information could help, it suggested.

“Increasing misinformation about climate change and climate action risks undermining positive action in the agricultural sector,” it said.

Hendy told The Post there were plenty of ways the Government could help farmers shift to less emissions-intensive activities.

“Thinking about something like new horticultural products, there's actually a lot of ‘upstream’ work that needs to happen to shore up new markets.

“There are plenty of places where government support could unlock the private sector to be able to take advantage of those opportunities.”

Asked whether the Government intended to take up any of the report’s suggestions, Watts said it would carefully consider the report’s findings before finalising its formal response, which is due in October.

Russell declined to say what Labour would do to close the gap between the 2050 goal and the current trajectory, saying it was not proposing any measures at this stage.

“We'll have our climate policy out in good time for the next election,” she said.

“I think that the public can see that we had really effective strategies in place when we were in government in order to get climate emissions down. In fact, we are on track to meet our current emissions budgets because of all the work that Labour did in government.”