Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau is the HBRC Climate Action Ambassador.
The kids and I have had bugs.
This has meant long hours at home making soup and hot lemon and honey drinks while I caught up on reading about the Government's National Emissions Reduction Plan and Emissions Budgets.
It's easy to be overwhelmed by the numbers – especially when you're foggy with winter bugs.
I read that the national annual average carbon dioxide equivalent budget is 72.5 megatonnes for 2022-2025.
What on earth does that mean for Hawke's Bay?
The kids watched yet another Netflix series, while I got my calculator out.
Hawke's Bay's emissions come from primary industries, goods-producing industries and services like post, trade, road and air transport.
Our household emissions come from personal transport and the heating and cooling of our homes. Statistics New Zealand has great regional information on greenhouse gas emissions.
While our regional emissions were dropping between 2008 and 2014, they began to creep back up by about 1.5 per cent per year, reaching 3,268 kilotonnes of emissions in 2019.
At 3300 kT, this is around 4 per cent of our national yearly emissions and represents a figure of 19 tonnes per head of population, slightly more than our national average.
To put it into sharp perspective, the Paris Agreement states that to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need to reduce worldwide emissions to 2.3 tonnes per person per year.
So how do we take the bull by the horns to tackle climate emissions in our region?
To meet the national emissions budgets, a quick calculation shows we need to cut our regional emissions by around 300 kT, or 9 per cent per year, before 2025, and an extra 460kT less per year by 2030, with an additional 520 kT less per year by 2035.
Electric vehicles are rightly being promoted as one of our best tools to achieve this, and you can certainly see (rather than hear) more of them around the streets.
Just imagine if we switched every single vehicle on the roads in Hawke's Bay to an EV (buses, trucks, passenger vehicles and utes included), so that every single kilometre travelled was a carbon zero kilometre.
The estimated 1.63 billion vehicle-kilometres travelled in the region per year would save just under 300kT of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.
Something that radical still wouldn't quite be enough to meet our first emissions budget.
If we all gave up flying for a year, we could achieve this goal with seven million less flights to Auckland, or 45,000 less return flights to London.
Yes, these are ridiculous calculations, repeated here only to stress the enormity of the issue and the changes we need to make across all aspects of our lives.
How we work, how we play and how we live.
Emissions reductions goals will influence how we travel, how we heat our homes, what we choose to consume.
The Regional Council is working to make this easier, with a major restructure of our Regional Public Transport network proposed and full electrification of the fleet to be phased-in by 2026, subject to consultation and funding.
We are reviewing the Sustainable Homes programme to support more energy efficient homes and working with our district and city councils to align climate action policies.
We are also working with farmers, supporting them to 'know their number' and calculate on a farm-by-farm basis the emissions released from stock and products, balanced against the amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere by trees and plantations on their land.
Each farmer will soon need a farm environmental management plan, and if the He Waka Eke Noa proposal goes through, they will be incentivised to use emission-reducing technology like nitrous oxide inhibiting fertiliser or low methane feedstock.
We're also working with landowners to plant the right trees in the right places, and protecting wetlands as an important source of 'blue carbon' removal.
There isn't one simple solution.
We all need to come together to create a Climate Action Plan for the region that makes sense for us as a community, focuses efforts where they need to be focused, and aligns with the ambitious emissions reductions targets.
We need this to keep our region safe and liveable, and more importantly, a place we want to raise future generations.
Pippa McKelvie-Sebileau is the HBRC Climate Action Ambassador
'It’s a great initiative', young Hawke's Bay entrepreneur backed by Rod Drury.