By ANNE BESTON
Energy Minister Pete Hodgson hailed yesterday's climate change agreement in Bonn as a good deal.
"It means we've got rules which are easy to understand and hard to break.
"Kyoto was only ever a very modest deal. It was never enough to get on top of the issue of climate change. That will take decades, yet we now have a mechanism by which we might."
New Zealand would have to work on cutting its methane emissions - the gas emitted by stock such as sheep and cattle - and on cutting carbon dioxide.
"The key issue, really, is that we have to make progress on energy - not because energy is our biggest problem, it isn't, methane is - but because energy is our biggest growing problem," he said.
The new agreement could make it easier for New Zealand to reach its emissions targets.
Our target under the protocol remains the same, to get our carbon dioxide levels back to those of 1990 by 2008 to 2012. Present estimates put them about 14 per cent above the 1990 level. But the Bonn agreement means we can take into account carbon stored in new and managed forests.
Even carbon stored in arable land will be taken into account.
One way we could take advantage of the clause on managing forests is by getting our possum kill taken into account.
Long-time conservationist Guy Salmon said that if New Zealand could show it had increased the amount of carbon stored in native forests because fewer possums were eating the trees, we could get credits under the protocol.
But opponents of the clause on forestry and arable land have said it is a big loophole that could help polluting countries to write off their carbon dioxide on paper but do nothing to curb the pollution itself.
New Zealand's methane gas emissions account for about half of our total.
Professor Blair Fitzharris of Otago University, a member of the UN's international panel on climate change, said we would have to continue putting money into research to find new ways of reducing methane gas from animals.
And New Zealanders' continuing appetite for electricity would continue to make it tougher to meet our targets, he said.
Our electricity consumption is estimated to be increasing at about 3 per cent a year.
Mr Salmon said the new agreement was a good thing because it spread the cost of cutting our greenhouse gas emissions over a wide range of polluters, not just smokestack industries.
But Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons was less enthusiastic.
"It's not a big victory for the planet, but it is a small victory for international diplomacy and cooperation," she said. The emissions targets for Kyoto had always been "very low" but this was a major first step.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
United Nations Environment Program
World Meteorological Organisation
Framework Convention on Climate Change
Executive summary: Climate change impacts on NZ
IPCC Summary: Climate Change 2001