Cindy Baxter is a long time climate campaigner, a member of the Coal Action Network Aotearoa organising group and a communications consultant, working on climate change for over 30 years.
While Simon Louisson did a great job of highlighting that National’s climate policy is a distinctively lesser being than that of the current government, he tripped up on some of the fundamentals, reflected in both the headline, “National set to renege on Paris Agreement” and the detail.
What is an NDC?
First, the Paris Agreement’s “Nationally Determined Contributions” (or NDCs) are not financial contributions, they’re our emission reduction targets, the ones we committed to and submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as part of our obligations under the Agreement, indeed signed by National in 2015 (and ratified in 2016).
[Fun fact: where did this weird terminology come from? Why not just call it a target? The name was proposed by India in the negotiations for the Paris Agreement, because it didn’t want to sign up to any notion of a “commitment”, a “target, nor even an “emissions reduction”. It wanted nothing that might indicate it was agreeing to be told what to do by anybody else, especially the rich nations. Hence the “nationally determined” bit.]
What’s our NDC and how are we going to meet it?
New Zealand’s 2030 target (NDC), an updated version of which the government submitted to the UNFCCC in 2021, commits us to a 50% reduction in gross emissions by 2030. (Through an accounting trick, this actually translates to a 21% reduction in real terms, that detail’s for another day).
We are not set to meet this target through reducing emissions at home, nor through planting trees: the target is simply too big. Without some kind of miracle or an overnight country-wide switch to electric vehicles or something, we’re set to miss our target by about 100 million tonnes.
So the government’s agreed way to meet the target involves a plan to buy international offsets. 100 million tonnes (Mt) of them. We pay other people in other countries to plant trees or build windfarms and therefore reduce emissions.
No other country plans to meet this sized chunk of its target through paying for international offsets (the EU has a strict limit, for example). This is such a bad look for our country. We get marked down for it.
How much will buying 100 million tonnes of international offsets cost?
Buried on page 87 of this Treasury document you’ll find the answer. Up to around $24 billion.
THIS is the cost that National’s Simon Watts says a National government won’t stump up for. It feels like an enormous sum to be paying for international offset schemes to get others to do the emission reductions for us to meet our target.
We also need to watch out for which offset scheme we’d pay into, given the increasing number of investigations showing how they don’t offset at all.
Isn’t cutting emissions at home better than this?
Yes! James Shaw argues, rightfully, that the more we reduce our emissions at home, the less we’ll have to pay for these international offsets (whose price may go through the roof).
And this is why the government has embarked on a huge programme to cut emissions, and has bent the curve, for the first time in our history. Emissions have dropped for the past three years. But we clearly need to do a lot more.
So what happens if we don’t pay for offsets to meet our target, like National says it won’t?
It’s clear that without these offsets, we would not meet our 2030 target. So this would mean National reneging on our Paris Agreement pledge. BUT we do not get financially penalised for this. We’d just be back to being an international pariah.
It could be argued that our offsets target already puts us there, but let’s be really clear here: National plans to cut a lot of the programmes that have led to the successful drop in emissions under Labour.
While we also don’t like this ridiculous offshore thing, that doesn’t mean National is better.
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