It’s time for all sectors of society to go all in on fighting climate change. The crisis is here, but so
are the solutions. If we all band together, we can restore balance to the world’s climate and avoid the worst of climate instability.
Twenty-one years ago, when Bill English rode Myrtle the Tractor at Parliament, holding a sign saying “the mad cow shouldn’t have signed” to protest against Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark signing Aotearoa up to the Kyoto Protocol, climate change was still a distant threat. It was something that was decades away and you could pretend it wasn’t real.
Not anymore.
Every year temperature records are broken and storms get wilder. Aotearoa was struck by successive cyclones and monster flooding over a matter of weeks in 2023 that will take years and billions to recover from. Insurance premiums are going up because insurers expect to have to pay out more in the future for weather-related disasters.
This is the future if climate change progresses unchecked.
Not one apocalyptic disaster but a succession of disasters that pile on top of each other over years. Droughts, storms, floods, heatwaves, outbreaks of tropical diseases and invasive species. More and more of our economic production being devoted to rebuilding what we used to have and into resilience, eroding our standard of living.
But I truly believe we are now at the point where we can choose a different path.
Globally, EV production is soaring while fossil fuel vehicle production is falling. There are 150,000 fewer fossil fuel vehicles on Aotearoa’s roads than there were two years ago, and 200,000 more hybrids and EVs. Hydrogen and biofuels are now real options for heavy transport and aircraft, not just possibilities on the horizon. E-bikes are some of the world’s best-selling vehicles.
And the power for the new clean transport fleet, along with a myriad of clean technologies and factory refits is increasingly coming from wind and solar, which are now cheaper than coal in most cases.
We are also more aware than ever that treating the land and sea well is crucial for the climate. In Aotearoa, there are many great organisations working to restore the whenua and moana.
I spoke recently on my radio show with people who are looking to create a ‘blue carbon’ market in Aotearoa. That’s when carbon dioxide is pulled out of the air by wetlands, mangroves and kelp.
This has the potential to be a huge project for Aotearoa and earn us carbon credits we could sell to other countries. Before most of our wetlands were drained for agriculture, Aotearoa had huge areas of wetlands, which store more carbon per hectare than pine forests.
Local hapū and iwi are working alongside experts like the Nature Conservancy, an international body that shares conservation and climate knowledge around the world.
Abbie Reynolds, its country director for New Zealand, told me they are working with iwi on a number of projects across the country. “Aotearoa New Zealand’s coastal wetlands have enormous potential to store CO₂ emissions, protect communities against flooding and storm surges - and preserve the unique habitats of native species.”
Alongside restoring unproductive land to native forest, restoring our wetlands and coastal habitats has the potential to make a serious impact in slowing the increase in carbon in the atmosphere and, eventually, bringing it back down again.
And the best news is that this Government is on board with blue carbon.
There’s much to be critical of this Government over when it comes to the climate – scrapping the Clean Car Discount, keeping agriculture out of the ETS, ending the ban on oil and gas exploration, ending help for businesses to go green.
But Chris Luxon has been talking about “using the ocean as a massive carbon sink” for several years now, and it’s something I want to see him get behind now he’s in power.
To be clear, blue carbon and other offsets are no solution in themselves to climate change. We’ve also got to stop emissions – and this Government needs to do better on that front. But getting behind blue carbon could help turn us from a laggard on climate action to a leader once again.
This is a crisis that requires us to adopt all solutions. We are not in the position, as some economists seem to imagine, of being able to ‘leave it to the market’ to pick the ‘least cost’ emissions reductions. We need to cut all our carbon emissions, as quickly as possible, and suck carbon out of the air as well.
And we need everyone – government, councils, iwi, hapū, local and international NGOs, industry, agriculture, businesses, communities, and whānau to play our part.
