New Zealand may not be invited to a meeting of high-ambition climate leaders in December over concerns about the country's inaction on climate change, Marc Daalder reports
New Zealand's attendance at a summit of high-profile, high-ambition global leaders on climate change is in doubt.
The Sprint to Glasgow meeting is scheduled for December 12, the five-year anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement. Hosted by the United Kingdom, it is intended to gather together the countries most intent on tackling climate change in the lead-up to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next year.
While the final list of attendees has yet to be determined, Newsroom understands New Zealand may be excluded over concerns it is not doing enough to reduce emissions.
A spokesperson for the British High Commission said only, "The UK shares a close partnership with New Zealand on climate change issues and we’re looking forward to working together in the run-up to COP26 next year".
Last week, British High Commissioner to New Zealand Laura Clarke told a climate change conference that she was concerned about a credibility gap between New Zealand's rhetoric and action.
"There is also a gap - if you’ll forgive me for saying it, as a friend, and someone who has married one of your own - between ambition and reality," she said.
"You have Scandinavian ambitions in terms of quality of life and public services, but a US attitude to tax. The brand 100% Pure New Zealand lulled many into a false sense of security, when the environmental reality is far more challenging."
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Despite Jacinda Ardern's 2017 remarks promising to treat climate change as "this generation's nuclear-free moment" and the Government's intention next week to declare a climate emergency, New Zealand has one of the worst climate records of industrialised nations.
Of the 43 Annex I countries - industrialised nations which have benefited the most from greenhouse gas emissions and therefore have the greatest obligation to reduce emissions - just 12 have seen net emissions increase since 1990. New Zealand is one of those.
In fact, New Zealand has seen the second-greatest increase in emissions (in percentage terms) among Annex I countries.
Bronwyn Hayward, a University of Canterbury political scientist who does work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told Newsroom she was disappointed by the news.
"I am disappointed that we’re not in the first round of the high-ambition countries, but that’s not unexpected given that we haven’t matched our rhetoric with reality," she said.
"I really love this country, I'm proud to be a New Zealander, but at the moment, working internationally, this is becoming embarrassing that we do not have real action on the ground and real ambition that matches the rhetoric that we set," Hayward added.
"I think that New Zealand needs a serious reality check about our commitment to climate mitigation and adaptation. We are in danger at the moment of falling in love with our rhetoric and not actually putting any action behind it, and it's starting to show internationally."
As part of the lead-up to COP26 - which was scheduled to take place this year but postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic - countries were asked to submit new, more ambitious emissions reduction targets. These Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the effort to fight climate change are the yardstick by which each nation's progress on climate is to be measured under the Paris Agreement.
New Zealand, however, still has the same interim NDC that the National government submitted in 2015. This doesn't seek to reduce emissions at all, but instead to limit average annual emissions over the next decade to a 10 percent increase from 2005 levels. Despite this, we are expected to overshoot our current NDC by more than 100 million tonnes of greenhouse gases - the equivalent of 15 million diesel cars circumnavigating the globe.
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Instead of producing a new, more ambitious NDC this year, Climate Change Minister James Shaw referred the issue to the Climate Change Commission, which is due to report back by May 1.
"We have relied on the Commission to set a base target which we should have been able to do as a country before the Commission began because we needed a target that met the agreement we signed," Hayward said.
She believes the Climate Commission will have to recommend "some very significant changes, far-reaching, to bring us into line with the Paris Agreement".
"But that only gets us to step one, where we should have been five years ago," she said.
"We have fallen further and further behind. We're big on rhetoric. Next week we will declare a climate emergency. But we do not even have a national plan to implement the very low ambition NDC that we inherited from the previous National government. We have talked a big game but now we haven't got anything to show for it."
