Decarbonising New Zealand – The Numbers that Count
Climate Change
Analysis: Figures from the Climate Change Commission show New Zealand will miss its net zero target by a country mile if proposed emissions budgets aren’t adopted.
On Friday, the Ministry for the Environment released new projections of the amount of greenhouse gases New Zealand will emit each year from now through 2050.
The data laid out a stark reality: Not only would New Zealand miss its emissions reduction target under the Paris Agreement (which it has always meant to reach with the help of carbon credits purchased from better-performing countries), but the country is also not on track to meet the domestic targets in the Zero Carbon Act.
How do the targets for different sectors like agriculture, transport and energy compare? Is the Commission asking everyone to pull their weight? Click here to comment.
Chief among these is the net zero target for long-lived gases by 2050 – the crowning achievement of the Government’s climate rhetoric, but doomed under current projections to be missed by a country mile.
The Ministry’s figures showed New Zealand would emit 10.6 million tonnes of long-lived gases in 2050, even after accounting for forestry removals. That’s a far cry from zero tonnes. The new data also has New Zealand failing to miss its 2030 and 2050 biogenic methane targets.
Then, on Sunday, the Climate Change Commission released an historic, landmark report that came to the same conclusion: Without a serious change of course, New Zealand would fail to meet its international diplomatic obligations and its domestic legal ones.
Read more:
* Key takeaways from the Climate Change Commission’s advice
* Newsroom’s in-depth analysis of the Commission’s report
However, the Commission’s report also offered a vision of how that course could change and what a decarbonised New Zealand could look like. Here’s what the data showed:
Targets achievable
To start with, the Commission showed New Zealand would miss its split gas targets – the 2030 and 2050 methane reduction benchmarks and the net zero goal for long-lived gases – on current policy settings.
However, all of these goals could be achieved with technologies and tools that already exist. No unproven methane vaccine or carbon capture and storage is needed for New Zealand to reach net zero by 2050.
In agriculture, existing farm management strategies around reducing herd numbers, reducing feed and ending the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers could see the 2030 target easily surpassed and the upper bound of the 2050 target crossed.
Net zero by 2050, too, is within reach. While the Commission’s analysis had New Zealand missing the net zero goal on its current trajectory by just 6.3 million tonnes, rapid decarbonisation of the transport, industry and power sectors could put net zero firmly within our sights.
Read more:
* Climate Minister James Shaw: ‘We can do this’
* The climate science behind the Commission’s findings
* New Zealand reacts to climate report
In fact, in the most optimistic scenarios modelled by the Commission, in which technology breaks our way and decarbonisation happens faster and cheaper than expected, New Zealand could reach net zero emissions of long-lived gases by 2040. Even in the “Headwinds” scenario, in which low emissions technology doesn’t come to fruition and behaviour change takes longer to bed in, net zero can be attained by 2048.
However, reaching net zero by either of those dates requires steep cuts to emissions, beginning as soon as possible. The Commission called for a ban on fossil fuel vehicle imports by 2035 at the latest, for example, and wants to see no new natural gas connections to the grid by 2025.
In percentage terms, net emissions must fall by a quarter in just over 10 years – and by a further 15 percent in the four years after that.
The emissions budgets set by the Commission for meeting these targets are stringent and the cuts only grow steeper with time. In the first budget period, from 2022 to 2025, New Zealand will have to emit about nine million tonnes less than it is projected to. By the third period, which spans 2031 to 2035, the country must emit 74.1 million tonnes below what is expected.
Economy-wide decarbonisation
In order to do so, it must decarbonise every sector of the economy and engage in a massive tree planting programme, oriented primarily at permanent, native forests rather than plantation forests full of the exotic Pinus radiata.
The Commission’s budgets chart a pathway over the next 15 years in which New Zealand emits considerably less than it is currently projected to. That involves steep cuts across every sector of the economy, but particularly in transport and other sources of long-lived gases like carbon dioxide.
By 2035, under the Commission’s advice, transport emissions would nearly halve from 16.6 million tonnes a year to just 8.8. Those reductions are particularly drastic when compared to New Zealand’s current trajectory, which would see 14.4 million tonnes of emissions from the transport sector in 2035.
In heat, industry and power, emissions in 2035 would be 6 million tonnes lower under the Commission’s pathway than currently projected. Forestry, meanwhile, would receive a big boost. While trees currently suck 9.5 million tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year and were expected to up that to 10.7 million by 2035, the Commission wants to see that figure increase by more than half to 14.5 million tonnes.
Agriculture, meanwhile is responsible for significant emissions in both short-lived methane and long-lived gases. The sector is currently responsible for 90 percent of biogenic methane emissions, totaling about 1.2 million tonnes of CH4 a year. That figure was expected to decline slightly to 1.07 million tonnes by 2035 but the Commission’s pathway would see it drop further to 0.97 million tonnes by that date.
Long-lived agricultural emissions mostly come in the form of nitrous oxide, a potent gas which is hard to abate as it comes naturally from the urine of livestock. Given this, the long-lived emissions cuts for agriculture are less steep than in other sectors – the Commission wants it to fall from 8.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (Mt CO2e) in 2018 to 6.9 million by 2035.
Even the gentlest of the Commission’s recommended cuts still involve emitting far less than the country is projected to in the near future. Over the first budget period, between 2022 and 2025, New Zealand would emit an average of 67.7 million tonnes a year – down from currently expected 68.7 million. Then the gap widens. For the second period, between 2026 and 2030, average annual emissions would drop to 57.3 Mt, instead of the projected 63.9 Mt. In the final period, from 2031 to 2035, the country would emit an average of just 44.6 Mt rather than the forecast 57.8 Mt.
These represent cuts from 2018 emissions of 2.1 percent, 17.2 percent and 35.5 percent, respectively.
