In this first part of a three-part series, political parties spoke to Newsroom about their approaches to adaptation, the next climate plan and farm emissions
The next term of government will be a critical one for New Zealand's fight against climate change. Key decisions will have to be made in a range of areas, setting the pace and direction of the transition to a low-carbon economy.
As part of the Defining Issues series, Newsroom has focused on three priority concerns for the next government's climate response.
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Whichever parties are in power from 2023 to 2026 will need to put in place effective frameworks for implementing and funding climate adaptation and managed retreat, with cross-partisan agreement. They will be charged with producing the next Emissions Reduction Plan, covering 2026 to 2030, and laying out how New Zealand will meet its 2030 Paris target. And they will need to make final decisions on the pricing of agricultural climate pollution, whether through He Waka Eke Noa or some other system.
These are thorny and complex areas. In this first part of a three-part series, representatives from National, the Greens and Act spoke to Newsroom for half an hour about their approaches to adaptation, the next climate plan and farm emissions. The Labour Party was unable to organise an interview despite having three weeks' notice and provided written comment to a range of questions instead.
Adaptation and managed retreat
Before the 2020 election, an expert panel chaired by Tony Randerson KC delivered a massive review of the Resource Management Act to Environment Minister David Parker.
That review recommended the Resource Management Act be repealed and replaced with three pieces of legislation: a Strategic Planning Act, a Natural and Built Environments Act and a Managed Retreat and Climate Adaptation Act.
Though the first two bills went to Parliament and were passed through in the final weeks of this term, there's been no sight of the climate adaptation act. As Newsroom reported in 2022, the Ministry for the Environment lost out on a Budget bid for staff to work on adaptation in 2021 and the bill had to be delayed and set on a separate track from the other RMA reforms.
Then, Climate Minister and Green Party co-leader James Shaw said, as the ministry was finally ramping up to deliver legislation, Cyclone Gabrielle hit.
"This is one of the great ironies, right? Which is that the cyclone recovery work programme hoovered up about half of my adaptation team," he says. "And that meant we weren't going to be able to complete work on the bill before the end of the House."
The slowness of progress on this issue is the main criticism from National and Act.
"We are frustrated that it was signalled by the Government that they would have legislation in play before [Parliament] rose. We didn't get that," National's climate spokesperson Simon Watts told Newsroom.
"James Shaw had stated very clearly that he would bring a climate adaptation bill to the House as leg three of David Parker's resource management reforms," Act's climate spokesperson Simon Court agreed. "Well, he didn't deliver it. He didn't even deliver an exposure draft for us to consider."
Instead, Shaw called for a select committee inquiry into adaptation and managed retreat, to lay the groundwork for cross-partisan agreement on the thorniest problems. That announcement came alongside the release of a report from an expert working group on managed retreat, which included some pretty explosive recommendations, as well as independent reports from the Environmental Defence Society.
Labour, National, the Greens, and Act all support the inquiry, though Watts wanted to see it hastened and Court viewed it as a symbol of Shaw's failure to get actual legislation across the line.
No one was keen to share their views on the recommendations from the report or the specifics about how adaptation and managed retreat should be funded and financed.
"It’s too early to take a view on the particular form of these processes," Megan Woods, Labour's climate spokesperson, said in a written comment.
"We’re committing to developing and legislating a new Climate Adaptation Framework next term, which will develop new processes for managed retreat and long-term sustainable funding sources to build resilience against more frequent and intense weather events."
A framework is National's policy too, Watts said.
"Our view is that we need to increase the pace at which we're coming into a position where we've got a national Climate Adaptation Framework. And we need to use that in order to feed in to legislation that we would be wanting to push through the House ideally within the first year of the first term."
The framework would be developed by government and stakeholders, including local government, banks, insurers, Māori and more.
Court wanted to see the private sector more involved in the policy development process, including in the select committee inquiry.
"The terms of reference [should] include the role of the private sector in helping manage the risk arising from climate change and weather-related events, because that was not in the original brief from the minister," he said. "We think that the private insurance sector has a whole lot of information that will help individuals and organisations better manage risk."
Shaw said the Greens were guided by three principles on adaptation, even if it doesn't have the specifics to hand.
"We need a solution that matches the scale of the problem, that's one principle," he said. "Second would be that we need to ensure that we take a hardship approach, so that we support people who are in cases of hardship rather than trying to recover every economic loss. Third would be that it does have a Te Tiriti lens applied, so that we are ensuring that we're upholding our Treaty obligations.
"Fourth principle would be that we take a nature-based solutions lens to this. That we work with nature rather than against it. And I guess the fifth would be this need for consensus. We recognise this is a generational problem that will have to survive multiple changes of government."
One of the first places in the country to have had a serious conversation about adaptation and managed retreat is Westport. How that process has played out will be the focus of the second part of this series, but MPs were broadly supportive of the work the Government has done there – even if they didn't view it as the end-all, be-all.
"In May, the Government has agreed to contribute funding of $22.9 million to improve Westport’s flood resilience. The exact details will be developed in partnership with councils and iwi," Woods said. That money will go to flood defences, nature-based solutions, planning provision updates, bespoke solutions for some homes and boosting the town's emergency management capability.
"There is an urgent need to build flood defences and flood protection works to protect infrastructure," Court agreed. However, he said, "whether that is a medium-term or long-term solution, that's not clear. It may well just be a short-term solution."
In his view, the proposal likely addresses the most significant risks but doesn't represent the end of the conversation for the town. Instead, it buys time for the Government to finalise its legislation and overall approaches to adaptation.
Though some of the money will go to nature-based solutions, the bulk supports hard engineering such as flood walls. Shaw said he didn't "wholly agree" with the design that was funded.
"It's complicated. There is an urgent problem that needed to be dealt with in Westport. That is one of the ongoing issues that we have, which is that when you're trying to do adaptation and resilience as part of your disaster recovery efforts, you need to move quickly on things in order to try and get ahead of the next disaster," he said.
"Ultimately, the decisions that were made around the design of the Westport package were in absence of an overall approach to climate change adaptation. So that's kind of part of the problem, which is that we've had – not just there but all over the country – these ad hoc approaches that are usually in response to a disaster."
So, in Shaw's view as in Court's, the Westport package addresses an urgent need but shouldn't set precedent for how to deal with these problems in future – there or elsewhere.
Emissions Reduction Plan
In April, the Climate Change Commission released its draft advice on the second Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP).
Under the Zero Carbon Act, New Zealand has five-yearly carbon budgets which limit how many tonnes of greenhouse gases we can emit in the relevant period. The ERPs are the plans for how we'll meet those budgets – the second one will cover emissions from 2026 to 2030 and must be released by the government by the end of next year.
In its draft advice, the commission made a handful of specific recommendations but also sketched out broader warnings. We are not on track to meet the second budget, it found. Even worse, under current policy settings we may well reach net zero in 2050 while still burning loads of fossil fuels. Net zero would only be a technicality – we'd achieve it through planting ever-greater swathes of the country in exotic pine trees, a programme that would have to go on forever unless actual climate pollution was cut.
The commission's final advice isn't due until a few weeks after the election, but parties have laid out policies they want to implement if elected.
For the Greens, the Clean Power Payment is their big play. This would give significant subsidies, in the form of grants and interest-free loans, to people to retrofit their homes with better insulation, electric appliances and rooftop solar.
"That will do a number of things. It will help to reduce household bills, because of course installed solar is cheaper than any other form of energy, but also it will help to build the amount of renewables in total in the country as we try and replace Huntly with renewables but also as we massively expand generation as we electrify transport and industry," Shaw said.
Woods pointed to Labour's climate manifesto, which also includes subsidies for decarbonising homes, alongside $300m for Green Investment Finance Ltd and a pledge to investigate a proposal to restore 2.1 million hectares of native forest in the next decade.
Watts highlighted three areas National is focused on: "Increased investment and rollout of renewable energy, agricultural emissions, and the EV space." The party has promised to cut red tape to enable New Zealand to double its renewable electricity supply, though the current Government is also consulting on similar policies. On EVs, National will can the Clean Car Discount, which subsidises low-emissions vehicles, but invest in EV charging, which it believes is the new main obstacle to uptake.
When pressed, he wouldn't say EV uptake would remain at its record high levels once the discount is gone. But the direction of travel is set now, he argued.
"Very much the train is heading towards the station. There is a point at which if we don't deal with infrastructure, then in two terms from now we continue to just pump in money around subsidy and we get to a point where adoption is basically stalling," he said.
Act has a completely different approach from the other parties. National, Labour and the Greens all agree on the overall architecture of New Zealand's climate response, including targets, budgets and ERPs, but Court wants to scrap almost all of that.
Instead, Act would rely solely on the Emissions Trading Scheme to reduce emissions. The cap on that scheme would be set based on 1 percent below the actual emissions reductions achieved by New Zealand's top five trading partners the previous year. Court lists those as China, Australia, the United States, Japan and South Korea, though Statistics NZ has Singapore ahead of South Korea in its latest data.
"We think that would actually be a very helpful price signal. It would mean that New Zealand businesses and their international investors can continue to invest here in New Zealand with confidence," he said.
Is it really fair to tag New Zealand's climate ambition to that of China? New Zealand is a developed country. We got rich off the back of burning fossil fuels, and under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change we have greater responsibilities for emissions reduction than developing nations.
"New Zealand needs to chart a course that is sustainable and durable and affordable. The fact that China is our largest trading partner means that we are inextricably linked to what they are doing," he said. In addition, Court believes China is quite ambitious on climate change, with a net zero CO2 target of 2060 and a commitment to peak emissions by 2030. He's comfortable tying New Zealand's progress to that of our largest trading partner.
Though it seems unlikely these policies will come to be, Court is confident that, if he can sit down in a room with Simon Watts after the election, he can win National over.
"I think, if we had an opportunity to discuss this directly with National's representatives in the way you and I are chatting or the way that I chat with them in Environment Committee, rather than through the media, I think it would become pretty clear what the opportunities are for enduring climate policy that doesn't require a Zero Carbon Act," he said.
Watts disagreed.
"I love the enthusiasm in the campaign. The reality is, we will be where we are post the 14th in terms of the makeup of who is in government and the proportions around that," he said. "Christopher Luxon has been very clear around this – National and the future National-led government are absolutely committed to meeting our targets both in 2030 and 2050. This is a matter in which we aren't going to be negotiating on."
In order to deal with the thorny issue of offsets over reductions, the Climate Change Commission recommended governments set separate targets for gross emissions cuts and carbon removals via sequestration.
Labour and the Greens have both agreed to this approach.
"We've committed to change the [Zero Carbon] Act in this way. We'd follow [the commission's] advice as to the set levels," Woods said.
Watts was slightly less specific but said National does want to achieve a "balance" of gross reductions and removals.
"We’re focusing on strengthening the ETS and expanding sequestration to increase our net emissions reduction and we have policies including harnessing biotech, electrifying NZ and EV charging which focus on gross reductions."
Act's view is that net emissions should be the main focus.
Agricultural emissions
The longest-running debate in New Zealand climate policy is what to do about our agricultural emissions.
The sector makes up half of our annual emissions and is behind 70 percent of New Zealand's contribution to global warming. The first attempt to price emissions from livestock failed nearly two decades ago and no party is campaigning on meeting the January 1, 2025 deadline in the Zero Carbon Act.
Though there was a brief spark of consensus between 2019 and 2022, when the Government worked with the sector via He Waka Eke Noa to design an acceptable pricing scheme, everyone has now retreated to their own corners.
Labour backs the plan it came up with in response to He Waka Eke Noa. This proposal isn't too different from what the sector produced and includes pricing emissions at the farm level, using the lowest possible price, while achieving actual reductions through generous payouts to farmers who adopt new technologies.
"No other country in the world has yet developed a system for pricing and reducing agricultural emissions," Woods said. "The most important thing is getting an emission reduction system that achieves the targets and lasts. This is forecast to do so and we are working hard alongside the agriculture sector to strike the balance between building good levels of sector buy-in, while also ensuring the system is robust and meets our emissions reductions goals."
There are doubts about whether this plan will work, which drove Shaw to back a special emissions trading scheme just for livestock methane.
"We think that tradable methane quotas will actually work whereas the He Waka proposal won't," he said. "The reason we think the He Waka proposal won't work is that it's an uncapped system with a low price."
He pointed to Newsroom analysis which found the price under the Government's plan would be less than 15c per kilogramme of beef or lamb by 2030.
"The second reason I think it won't work is that it leaves pricing in the hands of ministers, and if there's one thing that we have learned time and time again, it's that when you ask ministers to set prices – particularly for farmers – they won't follow scientific advice, they'll back down to political pressure."
Shaw believes he can win farmers over to his system.
"I hear from farmers all the time, 'We're not opposed to environmental regulations, we're opposed to environmental regulations that don't work.' I think they know that He Waka doesn't work. That drives farmers up the wall more than just about anything," he said.
"Whereas if you set up a peer-to-peer, farmer-to-farmer, system and you cut Wellington out of it and you place the onus on farmers, I think they'll respond to that. So I think I can sell it."
The views of farmers on pricing and emissions reductions will be covered in the third and final part of this series.
On this issue, Act believes there's more work to be done on the sequestration achieved on farmland and the warming impacts of methane. Once that research is done, Court too backs a cap-and-trade system but with the cap tied to what our trading partners are doing.
"If New Zealand is the only one applying that price to agricultural emissions, then that becomes an issue for our competitiveness," he said.
National still supports pricing, but wants to see the deadline for pricing pushed back to "no later than" 2030. Labour and the Greens say their pricing would begin later in 2025, whereas Act doesn't have a target date.
Watts said National would achieve reductions through investing in new technologies and opening up New Zealand to GMOs which can help cut livestock emissions. It doesn't make sense to price emissions if the tools to reduce them aren't available, he said. Some practice changes do currently exist which can reduce emissions on New Zealand farms.
The key opportunity for wiggle room is the upcoming review, required under the Zero Carbon Act, of New Zealand's climate targets by the Climate Change Commission. When National announced its policy, it said a new methane target should be based on "no additional warming" from agriculture – basically pledging to lock in the warming already caused by the sector up to whatever base year the party ends up choosing.
A Newsroom analysis of this policy suggested it could halve the ambition of our methane targets. Watts said he didn't want to preempt the results of the review, but the issue is more likely to come down to a political judgment call than a scientific finding. The science on the warming impact of methane is well understood.
In the end, it's the job of the government of the day to decide whether a target should lock-in past warming, or how ambition should be distributed among sectors.
Watts pushed back on the suggestion that National would weaken New Zealand's methane targets, however.
"Our status quo is that we are committed to meeting our current targets around methane. That's the starting point," he said.
"On the basis that we accept the current status quo, it doesn't infer that we are going to default to a softening position. Absolutely not. Our view is we need to accelerate our ability to meet our targets."
