The Government is looking for alternatives to tree-planting to meet our ambitious climate targets – novel removal technologies could play a part.
New Zealand could soon start to meet its climate targets through an array of novel carbon-sinking activities, including natural methods such as wetland rejuvenation, blue carbon, and more unproven chemical technologies.
A Cabinet paper released by the Ministry for the Environment shows the Government is working on a new Carbon Removals Strategy. This document will be incorporated into the second Emissions Reduction Plan (covering 2026 to 2030) and seeks to find alternatives to planting trees.
Though Climate Change Minister James Shaw announced the Cabinet decision at the Green Party AGM in early July, the paper reveals further details about the work programme. It says a draft strategy should be completed by the end of the year and will be consulted on alongside the second climate plan early next year.
READ MORE: * Shaw announces better recognition of carbon sinks * Govt consults on removing forestry from ETS
The strategy will cover biological and chemical sequestration processes as well as actions that reduce current land-related emissions. Drained peatlands, for example, are a significant source of carbon dioxide in New Zealand and re-wetting them could qualify as carbon removal.
Its objectives would include positioning removals as a complement to outright pollution cuts, a more diverse portfolio of sequestration activities through investment and prioritisation by the public and private sector, and incorporating these new sinks into New Zealand's climate measurements and targets.
As it stands, New Zealand's Paris target is expected to be met through up to 100 million tonnes off overseas carbon credits, alongside about 50 million tonnes of reductions at home over the next seven years. Expanding the scope of what counts as a legitimate removal could help reduce that overseas liability, but the new methods would have to meet a high scientific bar for eligibility.
"You can put whatever you want into your [greenhouse gas] inventory and therefore your target, but it has to withstand an international scientific peer review," Shaw told Newsroom. "We would have to be satisfied that a bunch of Canadian scientists could kick the living daylights out of it and it would pass that test."
Alongside the removals strategy, Cabinet also authorised Shaw to begin work on two key regulatory changes – a new regime that sets minimum criteria and thresholds that new activities will have to meet to be eligible, and changes to the Emissions Trading Scheme to allow eligible activities to be included along tree-planting.
The carbon market is being reviewed with an eye to reducing the incentives for removals – or at least ensuring the incentive for actual cuts remains – and these new activities would be wrapped into whatever solution is found for trees through the review.
Shaw anticipates the necessary changes to expand the scope of eligibility would be in place and new sinks would begin to be credited from the end of 2026.
"There's some research that some people are already doing, both domestically and internationally, which is quite far advanced. For example, the Government actually put several tens of millions of dollars into the Carbon Max programme, which looks at the additionality gain if you remove browsing pests from old growth native forests," he said.
"There are companies, domestically and internationally, who are looking at marine sequestration through seaweed for example. Some of that is quite far advanced. There are people looking at monitoring re-wetting peatlands and wetlands. Some of that is quite far advanced. Some of these things I could image being able to reach the scientific threshold at approximately the same time that the framework's ready to go."
There's another aspect of this whole plan that's a bit more subtle, Shaw said. The Cabinet paper is one of the first official documents to seriously entertain what happens after we hit net zero – basically, how do we sustain and incentivise net negative emissions through ongoing removals?
"It points in the direction of eventually going to negative emissions. We've never done that before," he said.
The big issue here is one of demand. Though there's already forecast to be plenty of supply of carbon credits from forests for the foreseeable future, the Climate Change Commission has warned the demand will crater in the mid-2030s. That means the carbon price could fall and foresters could go bust – not to mention anyone who invests in more expensive or speculative non-tree sinks.
"We need to manage that issue, assuming that the commission are correct that there is an issue. But if you're going to get to negative emissions, you need to go much further than the drawdowns from the atmosphere that the ETS is designed to draw down," Shaw said.
"If you say we're not just going to get to net zero and stay there, but actually at some point after net zero you get to negative emissions, you need a way of dealing with that. This starts to lay the foundations for that. You could do that through the ETS somehow, or you could look at a parallel system for removals. Those questions are for the future."
