Malina Grube: Climate lawyers playing a crucial role for our future

A woman holds the hand of a child and wades through floodwaters along the banks of the river Yamuna in New Delhi, India. Photo / AP

Opinion

OPINION

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that we have roughly eight years of constantly reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

So, if we do not act immediately, we will not have a future on this planet.

Scientists imagine a potential collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), making the Earth unliveable, with devastating effects on humans and animals.

This is why every decision made by governments, policy-makers and courts now influence whether we have a future or not.

What is Tāmaki Makaurau doing to reduce emissions?

Well, the actions taken in our biggest city are rather disappointing.

Let's look at Auckland's recent regional land transport plan (RLTP). The plan proposed for the next 10 years will result in a 6 per cent emission increase in Auckland's transport sector, not a decrease.

As our biggest city in Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau contributed 34 per cent of all emissions in 2019.

The Government is part of several international treaties, such as the Paris Agreement, so an increase in emissions is not good enough.

With more than one-third of emissions coming from Auckland, we see how every single decision can influence achieving our overall targets. It feels a bit like we are on the Titanic. We can see the iceberg, we know it will destroy us, but instead of steering away and slowing down, we increase our speed towards it.

Surely that's not legal. What is anybody doing about it?

All Aboard Aotearoa (AAA) is an association of lawyers who actually care about climate change. In July, it took Auckland Transport (AT) to court over this plan, and lost. AT claimed that, in fact, the transport plan does not have to prioritise climate change and its impact on the environment.

Auckland Council played a big part in AT's plans. You see, the council had previously agreed to plan for a 64 per cent reduction in emissions in transport over the next 10-year period. Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri was the leading document that the council had carefully drafted with actually good intentions concerning the environment, including this decrease in emissions.

When the council consulted AT on the new RLTP, it seemed to have forgotten about its good intentions and entirely ignored its plans for emission reduction. The judge also thought Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri was not binding on any transport plan decisions.

Malina Grube. Photo / Supplied

What a slap in the face for climate experts, tangata whenua and youth, who had all been involved in drafting this document. And actually, also a slap in the face for the council, which had been working on this document for quite some time, even though their consultations on the RLTP did not reflect that.

The council and AT stood on the same side in court here, but it almost makes me feel like they forgot to consult beforehand. It makes me question how much trust will be put in the council going forward when it comes to climate change policies if those policies are basically useless in courts.

AAA has appealed to the Court of Appeal, so now we wait. Environmental law is an area where many areas of the law overlap and it is also relatively new, especially regarding climate change decisions.

There are always winners and losers in the law. But with environmental law, the boundaries are a bit blurrier. In this case, who are the losers? All Aboard Aotearoa? Council? People in Tāmaki Makaurau? New Zealanders? Humanity? Spoiler alert: it is all of us. Sadly this decision and our future are in the hands of the law.

I certainly think that a judge who puts more emphasis on climate change and its effects on the environment could come to a different conclusion or at least deliver a different judgment. We have already seen judges acknowledge the importance of courts making policy decisions concerning climate change in the case of Thames v Coromandel. Those decisions are moving us forward in the right direction, as cases in environmental law and climate change will keep coming forward.

Why should we care?

I know all the nitty-gritty legal stuff can be draining and confusing, even as a law student. But as a young millennial, every single decision made in courts on climate change globally affects our generation specifically.

It affects our choices as to where we should be living that might be safe in the future, whether we should have children, and what career to pursue. Every single decision of our lives. Judges who decide that policy decisions on climate change go beyond their scope purely because they are not interested enough are putting another nail in the coffin for our whole generation.

Pakistan is currently flooded, the Amazon keeps burning, climate refugees are a reality, and our cost of living has increased, with one of the reasons being dying crops. We are noticing the effects of climate change right now.

Talking to people around me who care about their future, many of us feel climate anxiety, let down by the international governments and want things to change.

So, will we hit the iceberg?

I hope not.

Governments and courts are at the forefront of making a change but it is also up to us. Our voices need to become so loud that they cannot be ignored. As I said, this crisis is not something we can hope for someone else to fix.

Every small decision that negatively contributes to climate change counts; that's why it is so important to talk about cases like the AAA case.

It takes people like climate lawyers or youth to bring forward these cases to try to pull the break. Because trust me, when this ship is hitting the iceberg and sinking, the people in power won't let us sit in their life rafts.

Malina Grube is a fifth-year international law and psychology student at the University of Auckland. She is interning at the New Zealand Centre of Environmental Law, and is an activist at Fridays for Future Tāmaki Makaurau.