Watts said investment in climate initiatives would now be considered through “the usual Budget process”, although some $2.6b in work earlier funded through the Cerf would continue.
That included a public network for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, a grant scheme for clean heavy vehicles and the development of a scheme for measuring farm emissions.
Watts said Budget 2024 included other new spending to support New Zealand’s climate goals, such as projects to build stopbanks and floodwalls through the Regional Infrastructure Fund.
The Government has also opted to spend its share of revenue from the Waste Disposal Levy on a wider range of climate and environment-focused projects.
Watts said the Government remained committed to New Zealand’s set climate goals and was “on track” to meeting those of its first five-year emissions budget, with the ETS sitting at front and centre of future plans.
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The Green Party was however quick to blast the Budget, which party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said had left almost every programme in the Emissions Reduction Plan “absolutely gutted”.
“This Government has slashed and burned almost all climate and environmentally minded policy whilst pouring coal, oil and gas over the roaring climate crisis fire,” she said.
“The Minister of Climate Change needs to front up and explain how big a chasm his Government has created in the emissions budgets that it signed up to, and how they plan to make up for that.”
WWF New Zealand chief executive Kayla Kingdon-Bebb said the decision to lift the Cerf’s ring-fencing was a “disgrace”.
“It’s incredibly shortsighted to be looting ring-fenced money from the Climate Emergency Response Fund – arguably the single most powerful investment New Zealand has ever made into our climate response – to fund tax cuts.”
Greenpeace, which has called for a “March for Nature” in Auckland next month, also pointed to cuts to environment-facing agencies and other green programmes that’d had funding slashed.
“Without enough funding, these agencies cannot respond to the anti-nature policies this Government keeps throwing at them,” said the group’s executive director, Russel Norman.
Jamie Morton is a specialist in science and environmental reporting. He joined the Herald in 2011 and writes about everything from conservation and climate change to natural hazards and new technology.
