Officials from the environment and education ministries clashed over whether schools should report their air travel emissions, Marc Daalder reports
The education sector's contribution to the Government's pledge to be carbon neutral by 2025 has hit a speed bump, with the Ministry for the Environment briefing ministers about a lack of "sufficient ambition".
The Carbon Neutral Government Programme requires school boards to start reporting their greenhouse gas emissions by the end of next year. Cabinet has previously agreed to let the Ministry of Education handle this centrally, due to concerns about the capacity and capability of school leadership.
Collecting technical information from every school in the country can be difficult, the education ministry said. It has sought electricity consumption information from schools since 2017. Although the process "requires two simple actions", it only reached a 50 percent response rate this year.
"Every state school has been contacted at least once, many multiple times."
According to briefings released to Newsroom under the Official Information Act, a report commissioned by the education ministry estimated that the state schooling sector emits just under 80,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year. Only three-quarters of school emissions can be easily collected centrally, so the ministry plans to model the remainder in its reporting.
Environment officials supported the central reporting approach and the decision to model some hard-to-report emissions, but said the school emissions reporting plan "does not present sufficient ambition for the schooling sector, and therefore does not fully align with the intent of the carbon neutral programme, or the change required by other participating organisations".
Officials said this was particularly important because the carbon neutrality programme is meant to demonstrate leadership in decarbonising and schools are particularly visible elements of the public sector.
The two major concerns held by the Ministry for the Environment were the decision to model, rather than report, air travel emissions and a lack of clarity on how the education ministry will equip schools to report more of their emissions as time goes on.
"We understand the Ministry of Education's approach aims to limit school staff involvement; but some data is naturally collected and organised by schools themselves. Further, if individual schools are involved in data collection it helps them understand their own context to better influence emissions reductions," environment officials wrote.
The Ministry of Education's estimates indicate that air travel is responsible for 9 percent of emissions from the schooling sector. It's the single largest portion of the emissions that will be modelled, rather than collected and reported.
"The Ministry of Education is doing the bare minimum and the Ministry for the Environment is rightly grumpy about it," Alva Feldmeier, the executive director of 350 Aotearoa, told Newsroom.
In their own report to Education Minister Chris Hipkins, education officials said that after engagement with the environment ministry, they would report back to ministers on a more definitive timeline for reporting air travel emissions this month.
"We intend to explore ways to capture data not currently within scope, particularly air travel, in the second half of 2022 after we have created new systems and processes to enable the recommended reporting. It is our view that widening our reporting scope should be managed in a measured fashion, with a view to implementing from the 2023/24 reporting year."
A spokesperson for the education ministry told Newsroom the briefing was still being prepared and didn't answer questions about when air travel emissions reporting might begin.
In written comments on the education briefing, even Hipkins expressed doubt that such a delay was needed.
"I'm not convinced that requiring schools to report emissions from air travel is that much of an impost, and it might get them thinking twice about spending scarce [money] on flights when a Zoom could fill the need cheaply and in a more time-efficient manner. I'd also be keen to see us lean in more on waste minimisation. A lot of schools are already ahead of the curve on this," he wrote.
Waste-to-landfill and wastewater were estimated to be responsible for 3 and 4 percent of the sector's emissions, respectively.
The single largest emissions source, according to the report commissioned by the ministry, was daily bus routes at 31 percent. Coal and fossil gas produced 12 and 8 percent of the sector's emissions and electricity was responsible for another 17 percent.
