Dysfunctional political cultures, complacency and vested interests all hobble NZ in confronting the climate crisis. Empowering people is the most crucial way forward, and that means overhauling our democracy.
Opinion: A lot of people around the country are making impactful responses to our climate crisis. They are big thinkers, creative innovators and fiercely determined individuals working with others in their endeavours.
That was what we set out to report in our Newsroom video series The Way Forward, all 10 episodes of which are now available on our website.
A simple structure ran through the series: take one big climate issue per episode, find a leader or leaders pursuing one big, bold idea that could stimulate much wider climate actions, and let them tell their stories.
READ MORE: * The road to water recycling * Changing the way NZ noves * Why NZ must integrate nature and urban design
We started in late February with an episode on the imperative of bringing nature back into urban environments. That will help us make our towns and cities more resilient to climate shocks, while also making them much better places to live and work.
As it happened, we taped that first episode some months before our shocking Anniversary Weekend storm in Auckland and the far worse devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle a few weeks later in Tairawhiti and Hawke's Bay.
Those events proved the points about nature and resilience made in the episode by the person I interviewed – Alec Tang, who led the development of Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri Auckland's Climate Plan.
For example, neighbourhoods close to Auckland's Oakley Creek suffered far less damage than they had in earlier but lesser storms. The reason was the creek had room to overflow safely into quick draining areas during intense storms, thanks to Auckland Council's extensive work there over recent years.
The final episode was on climate anxiety and action. Many people find anxiety deeply debilitating, yet it can also spur them into action, as Niki Harré, a psychologist, explained; and three climate activists spoke of their experiences.
The eight episodes in between examined a big shift underway in each of these sectors: transport, electricity, farming, the circular bioeconomy, food, citizen democracy, the application of Māori knowledge to our built environment, and tourism.
So far, the Māori knowledge episode has attracted the most views; and the circular bioeconomy one the fewest. The tourism episode prompted the most comments online; and farming, the circular bioeconomy and water recycling (an example of a citizens' assembly making a far-sighted decision) the fewest.
Such data are too specific and limited to give us at Newsroom a deep and nuanced understanding of viewers' responses. We're very keen, please, if you have such feedback for us.
But I will hazard some thoughts:
► Currently, the national debate is focused on the massive liabilities we're accruing by grossly over-planting radiata pine for their cash income from carbon sequestration credits.
But the best way for us to deal with that is to understand that our forests offer us far greater economic, climate and biodiversity benefits from a wider range of species and a wider range of uses for them.
The circular bioeconomy is the heart of the latter. Some highly skilled and effective proponents of the circular economy are doing excellent work on it here in New Zealand, as I've described in some columns. But we have an enormously long way to go before it's at the very heart of our climate responses – as it must be for all economies.
► Powerful farming interests are fighting fiercely to preserve their climate-damaging, economy-weakening status quo. Consequently, they're sucking much of the attention, energy and investment out of the heroic efforts farming pioneers are making to ensure our farming systems are climate compatible, biodiversity beneficial and economically superior.
► The people featured in this series are showing us some of our ways forward. But as a nation, our actions on climate are still falling far behind the scale, sophistication, and urgency we must have if we want to give ourselves a fighting chance of tackling the crisis in ways that improve our natural environment, economy, and society.
Lots of factors hobble us. Dysfunctional political cultures and systems, adversarial national discourse, complacency and short-termism, vested interests' defence of the status quo, a reluctance to confront the crisis, and a lack of imagination about how beneficial our solutions will be.
All nations are suffering from the same ills to a greater or lesser extent. We need a vast range of positive responses to break the logjam. Empowering people is just one of them, but the most crucial.
One way to do that is to overhaul democracy. Mechanisms to help in that huge task include citizens' assemblies and other forms of deliberative democracy. These give people the opportunity to come to grips with an issue and make a collective, binding decision about how to solve it. An example of that was in our seventh episode, The road to water recycling.
On a personal note about the series, my great thanks goes to all the people who told their stories; to Leon Menzies, Baz Platt and Simon Cooper who videoed them; to Mark Jennings and Paul Enticott, my Newsroom colleagues who edited the episodes; and to NZ on Air's Public Interest Journalism Fund for the financial support that made the series possible.
After decades of journalistic writing, this was my first foray into visual story telling. I learnt many positive things in doing so. Not the least of which, I've found another way to turn my anxiety into action.
