Indonesia’s plan to convert over 2 million ha of conservation and indigenous lands into agriculture will cause long-term damage to the environment, create conflict and add to greenhouse gas emissions, according to a feasibility study document for the Papua region mega-project.

The 96-page presentation reviewed by Radio Free Asia was drawn up by Sucofindo, the Indonesian government’s inspection and land surveying company.

Dated July 4, it analyses the risks and benefits of the sugar cane and rice estate in Merauke regency on Indonesia’s border with Papua New Guinea and outlines a feasibility study that was to have been completed by mid-August.

Though replete with warnings that “comprehensive” environmental impact assessments should take place before any land is cleared, the feasibility process appears to have been a box-ticking exercise. Sucofindo did not respond to questions from RFA, a news service affiliated with BenarNews, about the document.

Even before the study was completed, then-President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo participated in a ceremony in Merauke on July 23 that marked the first sugar cane planting on land cleared of forest for the food estate, the government said in a statement.

Jokowi’s decade-long presidency ended last month.

Excavators destroy villages
In late July, dozens of excavators shipped by boat were unloaded in the Ilyawab district of Merauke where they destroyed villages and cleared forests and wetlands for rice fields, according to a report by civil society organisation Pusaka

Hipolitus Wangge, an Indonesian politics researcher at Australian National University, told RFA the feasibility study document does not provide new information about the agricultural plans.

But it makes it clear, he said, that in government there is “no specific response on how the state deals with indigenous concerns” and their consequences.

The plan to convert as much as 2.3 million ha of forest, wetland and savannah into rice farms, sugarcane plantations and related infrastructure in the conflict-prone Papua region is part of the government’s ambitions to achieve food and energy self-sufficiency.

Previous efforts in the nation of 270 million people have fallen short of expectations.

Echoing government and military statements, Sucofindo said increasingly extreme climate change and the risk of international conflict are reasons why Indonesia should reduce reliance on food imports.

Taken together, the sugarcane and rice projects represent at least a fifth of a 10,000 square km lowland area known as the TransFly that spans Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and which conservationists say is an already under-threat conservation treasure.

Military leading role
Indonesia’s military has a leading role in the 1.9 million ha rice plan while the government has courted investors for the sugar cane and related bioethanol projects.

The likelihood of conflict with indigenous Papuans or of significant and long-term environmental damage applies in about 80 percent of the area targeted for development, according to Sucofindo’s analysis.

The project’s “issues and challenges,” Sucofindo said, include “deforestation and biodiversity loss, destruction of flora and fauna habitats and loss of species”.

It warns of long-term land degradation and erosion as well as water pollution and reduced water availability during the dry season caused by deforestation.

Sucofindo said indigenous communities in Merauke rely on forests for livelihoods and land conversion will threaten their cultural survival. It repeatedly warns of the risk of conflict, which it says could stem from evictions and relocation.

“Evictions have the potential to destabilize social and economic conditions,” Sucofindo said in its presentation.

If the entire area planned for development is cleared, it would add about 392 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere in net terms, according to Sucofindo.

That is about equal to half of the additional carbon emitted by Indonesia’s fire catastrophe in 2015 when hundreds of thousands of acres of peatlands drained for pulpwood and oil palm plantations burned for months.

Indonesia’s contribution to emissions that raise the average global temperature is significantly worsened by a combination of peatland fires and deforestation. Carbon stored in its globally important tropical forests is released when cut down for palm oil, pulpwood and other plantations.

In a speech last week to the annual United Nations climate conference COP29, Indonesia’s climate envoy, a brother of recently inaugurated president Prabowo Subianto, said the new administration has a long-term goal to restore forests to 31.3 million acres severely degraded by fires in 2015 and earlier massive burnings in the 1980s and 1990s.

Indonesia’s government has made the same promise in previous years including in its official progress report on its national contribution to achieving the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the rise in average global temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius.

“President Prabowo has approved in principle a program of massive reforestation to these 12.7 million hectares in a biodiverse manner,” envoy Hashim Djojohadikusumo said during the livestreamed speech from Baku, Azerbaijan.

“We will soon embark on this programme.”

Prabowo’s government has announced plans to encourage outsiders to migrate to Merauke and other parts of Indonesia’s easternmost region, state media reported this month.

Critics said such large-scale movements of people would further marginalise indigenous Papuans in their own lands and exacerbate conflict that has simmered since Indonesia took control of the region in the late 1960s.

Republished from BenarNews with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

While Japan’s discharge of nuclear waste waters into the Pacific from its Fukushima nuclear plant has been drawing flak across the Pacific, a high-powered delegation of Chinese ocean and marine scientists and Asia-Pacific scholars from Shandong Province visited Fiji to promote South-South cooperation to mitigate climate change — the Pacific island nations’ biggest security threat.

Facilitated by the Chinese Embassy in Suva, Shandong Province and Fiji signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to exchange scholars and experts from the provincial institution to assist the Pacific Island nation in the agriculture sector.

At the signing event, Agriculture Minister Vatimi Rayalu said Fiji and China had a successful history of cooperating in agriculture.

He told the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation that this initiative was critical to agricultural production to promote heightened collaboration among key stakeholders and help Fiji connect to the vast Chinese market.

Shandong Province has a 3000 km coastline with a population of 100 million. It is China’s third largest provincial economy, with a GDP of CNY 8.3 trillion (US$1.3 trillion) in 2021—equivalent to Mexico’s GDP.

The province has also played a major role in Chinese civilisation and is a cultural center for Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism.

On August 30, during a day-long conference at the University of the South Pacific under the theme of sustainable development of small island states, scholars from Shandong Province and the Pacific exchanged ideas on cooperation in the sphere of the ocean and marine sciences, and education, development and cultural areas.

Chinese assistance welcomed
In a keynote address to the conference, Fiji’s Education Minister Aseri Radrodro welcomed China’s assistance to foster a scholars exchange programme and share best practices for improved teaching and learning processes.

He said: “We are restrategising our diplomatic relations via education platforms disturbed by the pandemic.”

Emphasising that respect is an essential ingredient of Pacific cultures, he welcomed Chinese interest in Pacific cultures.

Also, he invited China to assist Fiji and the region in areas such as marine sciences, counselling, medical services, IT, human resource management, and education policies and management.

“Overall, sustainable development for Small Island States requires a realistic approach that integrates social, economic, and environmental considerations and collaborations among governments, civil society, international organisations, and the private sector that is essential for achieving sustainable development goals,” he told delegates.

Radrodro invited more Chinese scholars to visit the Pacific to increase cultural understanding between the regions and suggested developing a school exchange programme between Fiji and China for young people to understand each other.

The Chinese ambassador to Fiji, Zhou Jian, pointed out that China and the Pacific Island Countries (PICs), were connected by the Pacific Ocean and in a spirit of South-South cooperation, China already had more than 20 development cooperation projects in the region (he listed them) and 10 sister city arrangements across the region.

Building a human community
Pointing out that his province’s institutions have some of the prominent scholars in the world on climatic change action and marine technology, the Vice-Chairman of Shandong Provincial Committee, Wang Shujian, said he hoped that these institutions would help to build a human community with a shared future in the Pacific.

Many Chinese speakers reflected in their presentations that their cooperative ventures would be in line with the Chinese government’s current international collaboration push known as the “Global Development Initiative”.

This initiative has eight priority areas: poverty alleviation, food security, pandemic response and vaccines, financing for development, climate change and green development, industrialisation, digital economy, and connectivity in the digital era.

Jope Koroisavou of the Ministry of iTaukei (indigenous) affairs explained that the “Blue Pacific” leaders in the region talk about is a way of life that “bridges our past with our future,” and it was important to re-establish the balance between taking and giving to nature.

He listed three takeaways in this respect: cultural resilience and preservation, eco-system stewardship and conservation, and community component and inclusive decision-making.

Professor Yang Jingpeng from the Centre for South Pacific Studies at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications acknowledged that they needed to learn from indigenous knowledge, where indigenous people were closely connected to the environment.

Bio-diversity, climate action, South-South cooperation
“They play an important role in protecting biodiversity,” he noted. “Their knowledge of nature will be greatly beneficial to address climatic change”.

He expressed the wish that under South-South cooperation, their centre would be able to work with this knowledge and scientific methodologies to mitigate climatic change.

Mesake Koroi of the FBC noted that Pacific Islanders needed to get over the idea that because indigenous villagers practice subsistence farming, they were poor when, in fact, they were rich in traditional knowledge, which was important to address the development and environmental challenges of today.

“Using this traditional knowledge, people don’t go out fishing when the winds are blowing in the wrong direction or the moon is not in the correct place”, he noted.

“In my village, 10,000 trees will be planted this year to confront climatic change.”

On an angry note, he referred to Japan’s dumping of nuclear-contaminated water to the Pacific Ocean using a purely “scientific” argument, which he described as “inexcusable vulgar, crude and irresponsible”.

He asked if science said was so safe, why did they not use it for irrigation in Japan?

Nuclear tests suffering
Koroi lamented that historically, major powers had used the Pacific for nuclear testing without respect for the islanders’ welfare — who had to suffer from nuclear fallouts.

“The British, French, and Americans are all guilty of these atrocities, and now the Japanese”, noted Koroi.

Since China was coming to the Pacific without this baggage, he hoped this would transform into a desire to work with the people of the Pacific for their welfare.

Professor He Baogang, of Deaking University in Australia, noted that though the Chinese mindset acknowledged that dealing with climate change was a human right (health right) issue, it still needed to be central to their approach to the problem.

“This should be laid down as important, ” he argued, and suggested that this could be demonstrated by working on areas such as putting green shipping corridors into action.

“China and Pacific Island countries need to look at an agreement to decarbonise the shipping industry,” he argued. “This conference needs to address how to proceed (in that direction)”.

Pointing out that there was a long history — going back to more than 8000 years — of Chinese ancestry among some Pacific people, pointing out that some Māori traditional tattoos were similar to the Chinese tattoos, Professor Chen Xiaochen, executive deputy director, Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies, East China Normal University, noted “now we are looking for common ground for Pacific development needs”.

Knowing each other better
In an informal conversation with IDN, one of the professors from China said that the time had come for the people of China and the Pacific to come to know each other better.

“Chinese students hardly know about Pacific cultures and the people,” he told IDN, adding, “I suppose the Pacific people don’t know much of our cultures as well.”

He believes closer collaboration with universities in Shandong Provincial would be ideal “because it is a centre of Chinese civilisation”.

“Now the Pacific is looking north,” noted Professor Xiaochen, adding, “my flight from Hong Kong was full of Chinese tourists coming South to Fiji”.

Kalinga Seneviratne is a visiting consultant with the University of the South Pacific journalism programme. IDN-InDepthNews is the flagship news service of the nonprofit Inter Press Syndicate. Republished in collaboration with Asia Pacific Report.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Prime Minister James Marape delivered a shock yesterday when he announced his full cabinet, with coffee, oil palm and livestock — three of PNG’s traditional cash crops — getting their own ministries.

The separate portfolios were created from what used to be the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry in the 32-man cabinet Marape appointed yesterday.

The line-up had several notable omissions, while a few raised eyebrows like the appointment of Richard Maru, leader of the People First Party, as International Trade Minister.

It is too early to say whether the appointments have gone down well with everyone in the government ranks, however.

In the line-up yesterday, Pangu bagged much of the portfolios, followed by United Resources Party with five, while the United Labour Party and the PNG National Party were the obvious ones left out.

“We have broken up several ministries into smaller ministries to ensure accountability to deliver in relation to the budget.

“We have joined the transport sector with Civil Aviation, and police and CS are now part of one ministry,” Marape said.

Foreign affairs, trade separated
“Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Investment have been separated into two different ministries, now we have Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Ministry for International Trade and Investment.”

“We have carefully extracted international investment and trade and built emphasis around its importance by creating a separate ministry that is responsible for it. Investment and trade are the backbone of domestic production. One cannot exist without the other.

“The appointments specifically spotlight agriculture in a very significant way. It is the strongest emphasis yet, by any government, in agriculture growth in the country. It again shows that the government is willing to do what it takes to meet the full expectations of our people in agriculture.

“Agriculture is where the government can have the greatest impact in terms of the population of this country, because the bulk of our people are subsistence farmers. We have land, so we must encourage our people to go into agriculture production.

“In one swift action we now have a Minister for Livestock, Minister for Coffee, Minister for Palm Oil, and the main agriculture Minister.

“We are placing very strong emphasis on the subsectors that will have the greatest impact for our people. We are going to set targets and these specific ministers will be required to take specific action to ensure that their subsectors meet their targets. There is no mistaking what our focus is on this government.”

Marape said his cabinet fairly reflected experience, continuity, and regional balance.

He has chosen carefully from a pool of talented and capable leaders in government, and the appointments reflect competence and ability.

All four regions are represented in cabinet with 10 MPs — including Marape — from the Highlands region, 10 MPs from Mamose, six from New Guinea Islands and six from the Southern region.

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Only people power can ensure genuine enduring progress on climate and people need to know the truth if they are to act on it. For that reason greenwashing is the enemy of progress on climate and where you stand on greenwashing is the Rubicon of our times.

I have spent decades of my life as a climate activist fighting various deliberate forms of climate science denial propagated by climate polluting companies and their allied political parties, politicians, lobby groups and commentators.

The good news is that we have mostly won that battle. The bad news is that they have a new tactic, greenwashing, which is now a major obstacle to progress on climate change. Greenwashing is when businesses or politicians give a false impression, or spin, on their products or policies to give the impression that they have a positive impact on the environment when they don’t.

We now face a new landscape in which even oil companies claim to be doing their bit for the climate with “carbon offsets” and “2050 net zero goals”. Their aim is to stop real action on climate by making people think it is all under control.

One of the jobs of the government is to sort out the real climate actions from the greenwashing, to hold industry to account. And of course, one of the jobs of the government is to not engage in greenwashing themselves.

The problem with some of the actions of the current Aotearoa New Zealand government is that rather than holding business to account for its greenwashing, on some vital climate issues the government is actually a proponent of greenwashing.

This greenwashing is closely linked to a wrong-headed theory of change which we hear repeatedly from this government — the idea that climate issues can only be solved through consensus, especially consensus with the polluters and their representatives. The idea that we can’t make real policy to cut climate pollution without the consent of the polluters and their representatives is dangerous and inconsistent with the history of making change.

There are fundamental conflicts in the climate policy space — some industries will not accept that they need to cut emissions. The attempt to gloss over these conflicts and seek consensus means the government adopts policies that the polluters will accept, and which consequently do not cut emissions. This policy outcome is then sold to the public as a great victory when in truth it is a defeat — it is greenwashed.

Before getting into the specifics of the problems I want to acknowledge that this government has done some good things on climate. The ban on new oil and gas exploration permits was a win, even though it excluded onshore Taranaki and allowed existing permits to be extended.

The cap on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser was a win, even though it is a very high cap which has yet to be enforced. Greenpeace publicly celebrated these wins and congratulated the government on making these decisions, even while pointing out their limitations.

I tried to provide a transparent assessment of the environmental performance of the Ardern government back in 2020. I spent a decade as Green Party co-leader and I know there are wins and losses in politics and that compromise is a reality of politics in a healthy democracy.

But honestly admitted compromise is one thing, and greenwashing is another.

There will always be arguments as to what is an acceptable political compromise. We need to separate the issue of what is an acceptable compromise to enter government from the issue of greenwashing. Determining what is an acceptable compromise for the Greens to join the Labour government is formally a matter of decision for the Green Party and the Labour Party rather than the climate movement.

People like me are entitled to our views of the compromise, but it is the Green Party and the Labour Party that have to decide if it’s worth it. I am not a member of the Green Party or the Labour Party.

The issue of greenwashing, however, is an issue which is of direct and immediate concern for the wider climate movement. This is because when the government sells their policies as great climate advances, when in reality they are not, it misleads the wider public and the climate movement.

People can think they don’t need to push hard on climate because it is under control, when it is not. We then need to spend our time highlighting and explaining why the claimed win is actually spin, rather than campaigning for meaningful action.

This undermines our ability to get more significant progress on climate policy because the power and leadership to get progress on climate (like all other progressive issues) comes from civil society and if civil society is disarmed by greenwashing then climate policy follows dead end paths, stalls or  stops.

But why is greenwashing the biggest challenge the climate movement faces at the moment. How did we get here?

Goals remain unchanged, but tactics evolve
As I mentioned above, the first thing to understand is that climate policy is unavoidably and irrevocably conflictual, and hence political. That is because on the one hand the enduring overarching goal of big climate polluters in the fossil fuel business and industrial agribusiness is to prevent government regulations that will force them to cut their climate emissions.

While on the other hand the climate movement aims for emission cuts to achieve a stable climate.

This is a fundamental conflict globally, and in Aotearoa, and no amount of pseudo consensus can wish this conflict away.

Big climate polluters believe, rightly, that government regulation and pricing to drive emissions reductions threatens their business models and profitability. Other sectors of the economy, such as IT, can more easily adapt to a low carbon future, but those businesses in the industries like coal and synthetic fertiliser can’t adapt, and they intend to fight efforts to cut emissions all the way.

While their goal of preventing government regulation to force reductions in emissions has remained consistent, their tactics to achieve this goal have changed. And it is understanding the way their tactics have evolved that it becomes clear just how problematic the current government’s climate policies have become.

At the beginning the tactic they used was to deny the compelling weight of scientific evidence supporting the theory of human induced climate change. Climate denial was stock in trade for many right wing parties and agribusiness and oil industry lobby groups from the 1990s through to the 2010s.

But after a while that stopped working so they changed tactics to stressing uncertainty especially in the 2000s. They said climate change might be a thing, but there is so much uncertainty so we shouldn’t do anything about it. They played up the nature of scientific inquiry — that theories are not beyond questioning because they are not religious texts — to emphasise uncertainty and the need for delay. It was really just another form of climate denialism.

Billions spent on climate denialism
The polluting industries spent billions promoting climate denialism and uncertainty in order to block government regulation to cut emissions. They bought politicians, public relations firms and sadly some scientists to promote these ideas to delay action on climate. Their ideas were reproduced widely by the conservative commentariat, and many still are.

I spent many years of my life fighting climate denialism and eventually through the efforts of millions of climate activists we (mostly) won the battle against climate denialism. There are now few major governments or corporations or industry lobby groups that rely on climate denialist arguments to block government regulation to cut emissions.

Straight out climate science deniers have been pushed to the margins like Groundswell or the Act Party.

But the goal of the fossil fuel and agribusiness polluters remains consistent — they still want to stop government regulation to cut emissions — so they need a new tactic. And that tactic is greenwashing.

These days the polluters and their representatives say, “yes climate change is a thing” and “yes we should do something about it and you will be happy to know that we are doing something about it.”

Hence, they argue, there is no need for government regulation. Even though they spent the last 30 years blocking every attempt to reduce emissions and even denying climate science, they argue that they now take it seriously and there is absolutely no need for the government to do anything.

And what they are doing is often nonsense like net carbon zero targets in 2050 or buying offshore carbon credits or an industry controlled pricing mechanism like He Waka Eke Noa, or nitrification inhibitors etc. They don’t actually cut emissions in any significant way.

The purpose of greenwashing may seem relatively retail when it is done by a single company to sell stuff to consumers, but at a systemic level the purpose of greenwashing is to head off government attempts to introduce regulations and pricing that will force emission reductions.

There are of course some corporations and governments taking significant actions to cut emissions, but there are also many corporate and government actions that are just greenwashing.

Separating out the genuine climate actions from greenwashing is something that defines the climate politics of our time. And this is why the approach taken by the New Zealand government is so very problematic. People assume that the Climate Minister, especially a Green Party Climate Minister, will not perpetuate greenwashing, and will call it out, but it has not always been the case with James Shaw, and that makes it all the more insidious.

Government greenwashes the biggest polluter: Agribusiness
Which brings us to the problem with the current New Zealand government climate policy. Climate policy in this country mostly boils down to what you are doing about agribusiness emissions (biogenic agriculture emissions alone are about 50 percent of emissions) and transport (20 percent). The rest matters too but if you aren’t tackling these two then you aren’t tackling climate change.

Transport policy has not been great from a climate perspective but here I want to focus on the bigger problem — agribusiness — particularly intensive dairy.

We have had the same Prime Minister and the same Climate Minister for the nearly five years of this government. There have been a plethora of nice sounding climate announcements — the PM said that climate was her generation’s “nuclear free moment”, we’ve had the so-called Zero Carbon Act, a climate emergency declaration, an independent climate commission established, emissions reductions plans, improved nationally determined targets for reduction, signed the global methane pledge etc.

But there is still no effective government policy to cut emissions from agribusiness, by far the biggest polluter.

The problem is not just that the government is doing virtually nothing to cut emissions from agribusiness, the problem is that it is saying that it is taking climate change seriously.

It is equivalent to the Australian government doing nothing about coal or the Canadian government doing nothing about tar sands oil — all while telling us how seriously they take climate change. This is greenwashing and it is dangerous because many people think climate action is happening.

When the claims of meaningful action are fronted by a “nuclear free-moment” Prime Minister and a Green Party Climate Minister – the general observer could be forgiven for trusting that those claims are true.

The evidence that this government has done very little to cut agribusiness emissions is bountiful but let me focus on just one central area — agriculture and the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Taking government at its word
The government repeatedly tells us that the Emissions Trading Scheme is the most important tool to cut emissions. This is debatable but let us take them at their word.

If it is so important then why, 14 years after the ETS began in 2008, is the biggest polluting sector, agribusiness, still exempt from the ETS? For 14 years agribusiness lobbyists and industry groups such as Federated Farmers and Dairy NZ have successfully fought a battle of predatory delay to stop their sector facing a price on emissions, apparently the most important climate tool.

And every government (Clark, Key, Ardern) has given them exactly what they want — perpetual delay.

When the ETS was passed into law in 2008, the Labour government of the day delayed agriculture’s entry until 2013. A bad start.

At the time, myself and many others argued against the delay but the Clark government wouldn’t budge. The John Key-Bill English National government (2008-2017) that followed, delayed agriculture’s entry indefinitely. From the perspective of agribusiness, delaying is winning, and they were winning.

For a moment in 2017/2018 it looked like the newly elected Ardern government might have the courage of its convictions and that the agribusiness lobby would finally lose its battle to stop climate action.

The Labour-NZ First coalition agreement explicitly committed them to support agriculture’s entry into the ETS at 5 percent of its obligations. With NZ First’s vote secured, there was a Parliamentary majority to bring agriculture into the ETS. Finally.

Backed down under pressure
But then in 2019 the Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw backed down to agribusiness pressure and instead of agriculture facing a price on its emissions they adopted an industry proposal — He Waka Eke Noa.

He Waka Eke Noa was a proposal from agribusiness for a joint government-agribusiness initiative looking at pricing agribusiness climate pollution. In effect He Waka Eke Noa handed over to industry the design of the system to price their own pollution. New Zealand agribusiness was beside themselves with joy.

In time it would become clear that it was not just that industry would design the system, but they would design a system that they would control going forward.

And, the target date for starting pricing was 2025. That was two elections away — 2020 and 2023 —  and the chances of the current ministers still being there was remote. And if they did manage to win in 2020 and 2023, it was almost unheard of for a government to win a fourth term in 2026 so anything implemented in 2025 could be easily undone.

He Waka Eke Noa’s timelines left the industry partying. And as for the politicians, none of them were likely to be around to get the blame when nothing happened either.

In one of the defining moments of this government’s climate inaction, Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw stood next to Dairy NZ and Federated Farmers to launch the five year He Waka Eke Noa project, instead of implementing their own policy of immediately putting agriculture into the ETS.

James Shaw celebrated He Waka Eke Noa and went so far as to say “nothing about us without us” —  that is he used the slogan of the disability advocacy movement to infer that the agribusiness sector shouldn’t be regulated without their consent and agreement. That was a real low point I must say.

Predictably, three years of delay later, in 2022, the final report from He Waka Eke Noa was released detailing a complicated system that would cut agribusiness emissions by less than 1 percent. The headline reduction was higher but that is because it included the reductions that are supposed to come from technologies that don’t currently exist (magic bullets), the reductions that result from the unrelated freshwater regulations, and the reductions that come out of the waste sector.

Incidentally agribusiness has been saying those same magic bullets have been just around the corner for the last 20 years. If you strip out reductions projected to come from magic bullets, freshwater regulations and waste, the emissions reductions from the He Waka Eke Noa pricing mechanism are less than 1 percent. In addition, under the proposal industry would control the mechanism for regulating their own pollution — classic industry capture.

From the industry perspective He Waka Eke Noa was designed to stop government regulation i.e. stop agribusiness going into the ETS. Under criticism from Groundswell, both Federated Farmers and DairyNZ touted their achievement in keeping their industry out of the ETS.

The National Party also voiced its support for the final report. The Climate Minister was a little more muted.

Most people listening to the government talk about He Waka Eke Noa would think that it has been a tremendous success — after all doesn’t the government always say it wants consensus on climate? Whereas in fact its sole success has been to delay government regulation of agribusiness climate pollution — by three years so far — and, even if it were implemented, by its own calculations emissions would be reduced by less than 1 percent.

That is what consensus with polluters looks like and that is the corner that Ardern and Shaw have painted themselves into.

The purpose of greenwashing is to make us think industry is finally taking climate seriously and hence there is no need for government regulation, while in reality very little is happening to cut emissions.

He Waka Eke Noa is a perfect example of greenwashing:

• It looks like industry is taking climate change seriously with media coverage of all their hard work;
• The new scheme, if it is implemented, is controlled by industry, so full industry capture;
• The scheme has almost no impact on actually reducing emissions; and
• Even if, god forbid, the government were to reject He Waka Eke Noa and instead revert to putting agribusiness into the ETS when it makes a decision in late 2022, it is too late for that decision to be fully institutionalised before the next election, so it will be easily removed if there is a change of government in 2023 and not so hard even after the 2026 election. Predatory delay has been such a successful tactic so far for the industry, why change now?

The Glasgow target
The decisions by this government not to cut agribusiness emissions created cascading international problems of perception for the New Zealand government when it was required to offer a new target for emissions reductions at the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021.

The government wanted to look good with an ambitious target (known as a Nationally Determined Contribution) but had few policies to actually cut emissions. Other countries were raising doubts about the government’s climate commitment. The ETS was supposed to do the heavy lifting but, as the Climate Commission admitted recently, under current settings the “NZ ETS is likely to deliver mostly new plantation forestry rather than gross emission reductions”.

The answer was to use the potential future purchase of overseas carbon offsets to present a net target that looked ambitious.

The Climate Minister announced with great fanfare that New Zealand would commit to a 50 percent cut in net emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. NZ paraded its 50 percent target around the Glasgow climate conference. It sounds good until you realise not only does the target use tricky accounting to make it look much larger than it is, but that TWO THIRDS of the emissions reductions would come from buying offshore carbon offsets.

Sorry about the shouty capitals but nothing yells “greenwashing” quite like offshore carbon offsetting. Carbon offsets are notoriously corrupt, open to double counting, and are the carbon equivalent of papal indulgences. They are what you do when you don’t have policy to cut emissions but want to look good.

Yet this is the government’s plan to reach our international climate target — greenwashing. The Climate Commission has urged the government to contract the offsets fast: “It is essential that the government secure access to sources of offshore mitigation as soon as possible”. Instead of, you know, actually cutting emissions.

And just to show the government is not without a sense of humour they signed up to the global methane pledge to cut methane emissions — without a plan to cut methane emissions! In fact, in case industry was worried, when Shaw returned from Glasgow he confirmed that the government would not introduce any new policies to cut methane. Moooo.

But what about the giant climate bureaucratic superstructure?
Faced with this evidence of greenwashing on agribusiness and the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) some people say “what about the Zero Carbon Act”? That proves they are serious doesn’t it? I think that we do need institutional reform to deal with climate, and I’ve pointed to what we need and some of the problems of the Zero Carbon Act before, but it should not be at the expense of immediate climate action.

Much of the government’s climate policy focus in the last five years has been on building an elaborate climate bureaucratic structure. This began with the years-long process to get cross-party support for the Zero Carbon Act, the years-long process to establish the Climate Commission, then there was the years-long processes to build the carbon budgets and the Emissions Reduction Plan.

These structures and processes do look good but they don’t cut emissions – only regulations and policies that cut emissions actually cut emissions. Now you might argue that over time this bureaucratic superstructure will lead to significant emission reductions, and maybe they will, and maybe they won’t, and maybe they can be improved.

The problem is we don’t have years to wonder and hope. We need to have been tangibly cutting actual emissions for the last five years, and cutting them harder over the next five, if we are to play any part in stalling global climate catastrophe.

Spending five years on not implementing much policy to cut emissions, in order to implement a bureaucratic superstructure that might result in emissions cuts down the road if a future government has the courage to use the climate superstructure to implement the policies that this one has not, is plainly not a serious policy to cut emissions. Just implement the policies.

However, in agriculture, our biggest polluter, there is no ambiguity that this climate policy structure has delivered nothing. The Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) has almost nothing to offer except magical technologies that don’t currently exist. The government’s excuse for offering no serious policy on cutting agribusiness emissions in the ERP is, you guessed it, He Waka Eke Noa. Predictably Federated Farmers really liked the Emission Reduction Plan, because it, you know, didn’t reduce agribusiness emissions!

The 2022-23 Budget that followed the ERP allocated $710 million over four years to agribusiness climate initiatives, but it turns out the money is to look for magic bullets to cut emissions. And some of these magic bullets might be worse — recently $11 million was given to research nitrification inhibitors that kill soil biology in order to cut nitrous oxide emissions following the application of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.

Killing our soils is the exact opposite of what we need to do. The money in the ERP comes from ETS revenue paid by others, because agribusiness is not required to pay into the Emissions Trading Scheme. It is a giant subsidy from everyone else to agribusiness to maintain the pretence of climate action.

It seems a big price to pay to maintain the pretence — it would be a lot cheaper just to paint the cows green.

Some might argue that the climate bureaucratic superstructure may not achieve much in reality, but it is not actually harmful. Sure, the argument goes, this elaborate policy superstructure has wasted lots of time and energy which could have gone into policies that would actually cut emissions, but it is harmless enough.

Well, maybe you’d only think that if you haven’t been following the litigation. Crown Law, the government’s lawyers, are using the Zero Carbon Act etc to actually block climate action in the courts. Here are two quick examples.

In the most recent case against the Energy Minister’s decision to issue more onshore oil and gas exploration permits, the Minister’s lawyers argued that the Zero Carbon Act allowed for more oil and gas exploration and so it was fine. This is in spite of the fact that the world already has more oil and gas reserves than can be burnt to stay under the 1.5 degree guidance that is in the Zero Carbon Act.

Previously climate lawyers have been able to argue that the global situation for oil and gas must be taken into account but now, significantly, under the Zero Carbon Act, the Crown argues you can only consider the New Zealand situation. So the Zero Carbon Act is being used to justify oil exploration and protect it from legal attack by climate activists.

And in a previous case against the Climate Commission, James Shaw’s lawyers argued that the 1.5 degree target in the Zero Carbon Act was only “aspirational” and not binding on the government.

Marc Daalder reported it thus:

“Crown Law counsel Polly Higbee told the High Court references to 1.5 degrees [in the Zero Carbon Act] used “broad, aspirational language” and it would be “too prescriptive” to argue that the purpose section placed any actual duty on the Government.”

No actual duty on the government from the 1.5 degree target in the Zero Carbon Act is what Shaw’s lawyers told the court. Outside the court, when speaking to climate activists, Shaw says that the 1.5 degrees target is binding, but in court, where it matters, his lawyers argue it is not.

It’s hard to think of a clearer example of greenwashing. There were many people in the climate movement who worked hard to deliver the Zero Carbon Act and honestly believed it would be a significant tool to cut emissions, rather than defend oil exploration against legal attack.

The final argument for these bland instruments like the Zero Carbon Act is that we need to get broad political elite consensus on climate to get change. History tells us the opposite. To choose just one example which is close to the PM’s heart — nuclear free.

Nuclear free New Zealand was not a result of a consensus process. It was vociferously opposed by the National Party and its many allies — they voted against the legislation and spoke out against it. Nuclear free NZ was not won by reducing our ambitions to what was acceptable to the National Party and the US State Department.

Thousands of peace and environment activists campaigned for it and the Labour government eventually came round to their position, and stood up to provide leadership. There was no political elite consensus. The reason that the National Party never repealed the nuclear free legislation when they returned to government in 1990 was because of its broad support from civil society, support that resulted from civil society campaigners and a Prime Minister willing to fight for the policy (once he finally came round to it).

Introducing vacuous climate legislation that achieves little, in order to get the National Party to vote for it, is pointless, or worse.

Winning the debate on real climate action is the only way to ensure it sticks, and greenwashing undermines that public campaigning.

Conclusion
During the 2017 election campaign I bumped into Jacinda Ardern in Wellington airport and she told me my job at Greenpeace was to hold her government accountable. I respected her for saying that and I agreed with it, and still do. And so that is what I’m doing.

The government has done some good stuff on climate, but on the really big and difficult climate policy issues they are greenwashing. And the greenwashing has disoriented and weakened the climate movement and meant that we are getting much weaker climate policy out of this government than we would otherwise.

And I refer to Ardern rather than Shaw deliberately because there is an uncomfortable political reality that sits behind all this: Jacinda Ardern makes the climate policy in this government and James Shaw presents it. The first rule of politics is to learn how to count — look at the numbers and you will understand this government — Labour has a simple majority and Shaw isn’t even in Cabinet.

James Shaw may like the climate policy, he may not, I don’t know. He may be the architect of crucial bits of it, or not, I don’t know. He is allowed to say he would like to improve the climate policy, but he cannot speak out against it and keep his job. And once you dwell on that hard political truth, all this makes a lot more sense.

It’s not my job or Greenpeace’s job to say whether that is an acceptable position for the Green Party to find itself in, but it is our job to call out greenwash when we see it. We believe that only people power can ensure genuine enduring progress on climate and people need to know the truth if they are to act on it.

For that reason greenwashing is the enemy of progress on climate and where you stand on greenwashing is the Rubicon of our times.

Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa and was co-leader of the Green Party for nine years. He resigned from Parliament as an MP in 2015 to take up the Greenpeace position.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Deeper and and more rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to limit the worst effects of global warming, a climate scientist has warned.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report that global emissions of CO2 would need to peak within three years to stave off the worst impacts.

Without shrinking energy demand, reducing emissions rapidly by the end of this decade to keep warming below 1.5C will be almost impossible, the key UN body’s report said.

Even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.

At this point, only severe emissions cuts in this decade across all sectors, from agriculture and transport to energy and buildings, can turn things around, the report said.

IPCC vice-chair Dr Andy Reisinger told RNZ Morning Report the world was “pretty much out of time” to limit warming to 1.5C as agreed in Paris in 2015 and subsequently.

“What our report shows is that the emissions over the last decade were at the highest level ever in human history.

“But on the positive side, that level of emissions growth has slowed and globally we’ve seen a revolution in prices for some renewable energy technologies.” That had led to a rapid uptake of solar and wind energy technologies, he said.

“Also policies have grown. About half of global greenhouse gas emissions that we looked at in our report are now covered by some sort of laws that address climate change.”

The report said the world would need “carbon dioxide removal” (CDR) technologies – ranging from planting trees that soak up carbon to grow, to costly and energy-intensive technologies to suck carbon dioxide directly from the air.

Governments had historically seen these technologies as a “cop out” but they were needed alongside reducing emissions,” Reisinger said.

“The time has now run out. If we don’t achieve deep and rapid reductions during this decade, much more so than we’re currently planning to collectively, then limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is out of reach.

“And the world collectively has the tools to reduce emissions by about a half by 2030.”

NZ has ‘squandered 30 years’, says Shaw
Climate Change Minister James Shaw says Aotearoa New Zealand has the political will to tackle climate change but it would have been a lot easier if it had begun decades ago.

“We are one of the highest emitting countries in the world on a per-capita basis and what that means is we’re now in a situation where having essentially fluffed around for three decades the cuts that we need to make over are now far steeper than they would have been.”

“Our country has squandered the past 30 years,” Shaw told Morning Report.

He said the Emissions Reduction Plan to be published next month would set out how the country would reduce emissions across every sector of the economy.

“I think what’s different about the plan that we’re putting out in May is that it’s a statutory instrument”, he said, and was required under the Zero Carbon Act. It would have targets to reduce emissions to the year 2025, 2030 and 2035.

Shaw said measures like the clean car discount scheme were working.

New Zealand’s agricultural emissions had not reduced, he said. This was the year when final decisions would be made on whether agriculture was brought into the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the whole sector was involved in the process.

There were farms up and down the country doing a terrific job on emissions but like every sector there was a “noisy group” which was dragging the chain.

“I think the charge that Groundswell are laying that we are not listening to farmers is ‘total bollocks’, he said.

Shaw noted the IPCC report said 83 percent of net growth in greenhouse gases since 2010 had occurred in Asia and the Pacific — and that New Zealand, Australia and Japan, as a group, had some of the highest rates of greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2019.

Cut consumer demand
While past IPCC reports on mitigating carbon emissions tended to focus on the promise of sustainable fuel alternatives, the new report highlights a need to cut consumer demand.

Massey University emeritus professor Ralph Sims, a review editor of the IPCC report, said one of the overarching messages is that people needed to change behaviours.

Despite New Zealanders having an attitude that our impact was small, in fact the country had some of the highest carbon emissions per capita, he said.

“We need people to look at their lifestyles, look at their carbon footprints and consider how they may reduce them.”

One of the easiest for the individual was to avoid food waste, he said.

Sims was involved in the transport chapter and said it was a key area for New Zealand.

“It’s the highest growing sector, and makes up for 20 percent of the country’s emissions.”

Faster electric vehicles change
He did not believe the country was transitioning fast enough to electric vehicles, and government assistance needed to be ramped up.

Electric vehicle prices would also reduce over time and a second hand market would make them more affordable, he said.

Sims said New Zealand needed to “get out of coal” and some companies were already reducing their coal demand.

Though New Zealand’s coal industry was small, exploration was still on the table and just last year the Southland District Council granted exploration at Ohai, he said.

Methane emissions need to reduce by a third by 2030, which Sims said is “a major challenge, and highly unlikely” to be achieved in New Zealand.

Victoria University of Wellington professor of physical geography James Renwick said curbing greenhouse gas emissions was still possible, with immediate action.

“The advice from the Climate Change Commission does show that we can peak emissions in the next few years and reduce and get down to zero carbon dioxide hopefully well in advance of 2050,” he said.

“It’s impossible to overstate the dangerous threat we face from climate change and yet politicians and policy makers and businesses still don’t act when everything’s at stake. I haven’t really seen the political will yet but we really need to see action.”

Technologies available at present to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere were not able to operate at the scale needed to make a difference to the climate system, he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Apologies are, more or less by custom, the end of things.

Say sorry, and don’t mention it again.

As warm and moving as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s apology was over the immigration Dawn Raids of the 1970s, it will mostly fade away. At the function, standing under an Auckland Town Hall plaque honouring one of New Zealand’s worst administrators of Samoa (and Tokelau), no one I spoke to, knew who he was.

And yet nine years ago Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised for his actions and others.

Apologies are a bit of a sugar rush; something else is needed.

Which brings me to Australian-based academic Katerina Teaiwa who, during the dawn raid apology, tweeted it was great to hear, and added: “We’ll have to work on some specific recognition and support for Banabans from Kiribati & Fiji whose island was sacrificed for NZ, Aus & UK development/agriculture/farming/food security.”

Understanding what happened to Banaba is vital for Pacific futures; not just for correcting historical wrongs that can be dealt with a glitzy Town Hall confession of guilt.

Tragic story of Banaba
That said, the tragic story of Banaba and New Zealand’s role in it – and in Nauru – justify a formal state apology but Teaiwa is right to suggest a rather more ongoing process.

Banaba is vitally important for a number of reasons.

First there is the brutal business of not only robbing a people of their land, but also of enforced exile to another part of the world. Sea level rise, alone, may well make this more the norm, than unusual. Banabans, how they were treated and their response, offer much to an endangered low lying Pacific.

And as Pacific states move toward the business of seafloor mining, Banaba offers lessons in issues as diverse as “beware strangers offering lavish gifts” to “and where do we live after the strangers have taken all the riches….?”

What is also alarming about the Banaba story (and Nauru’s) is that their corrupt, illegal and deceptive plunder was done to make, in particular, Aotearoa and Australia rich. The soils of Banaba and Nauru contain motherlodes of phosphate which is needed to grow grass for agriculture.

Here is the rub: almost no New Zealanders know the story of Banaba or Nauru. And when pressed, some will say, reflecting colonial propaganda, that “we paid a fair price for the phosphate”.

No ‘fair price’
A simple reply: no we did not. Never did.

An apology to Banaba is necessary but only after Aotearoa and others come to terms with what they did to around a thousand people who, for centuries, have lived peacefully on a beautiful island.

Its stark ruins today should remind us that just saying sorry is mostly not enough.

Michael Field is a co-publisher of The Pacific Newsroom. This article is republished with permission.

Great to hear. We’ll have to work on some specific recognition and support for Banabans from Kiribati & Fiji whose island was sacrificed for NZ, Aus & UK development/ agriculture/ farming/ food security https://t.co/DndnKPvIiv

— Katerina Teaiwa ???? (@KTeaiwa) August 1, 2021

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Critics have hammered the Climate Change Commission’s agriculture goals in New Zealand, saying it has missed the mark on methane targets.

In a final 419-page report handed to Parliament yesterday, the commission urged the government to get tough on the way New Zealanders live, move and work, through implementing 33 recommendations.

To help keep global warming below 1.5C it said there should be no more new or used petrol or diesel cars imported, made or assembled in New Zealand by 2035.

The commission asked for substantially more government investment in cheap, accessible public transport, cycle paths and walkways, and no more coal boilers “as soon as possible”, with at least 95 percent renewable electricity used by 2030.

Greenpeace head of campaigns Amanda Larsson said it was all a bit disappointing because the report missed a major weak spot.

“Despite thousands of submissions in favour of climate action, despite huge public mandate out there for climate action, the commission has failed to really take responsibility for the industry that is causing the most climate pollution in New Zealand – and that is the dairy industry,” she said.

“There’s been no real change in its recommendations and the dairy industry still gets basically a free pass to pollute.”

Mechanism to reward farmers
The commission wants the government to decide next year on a pricing mechanism for rewarding farmers who reduce emissions.

It suggests technologies including methane inhibitors – vaccines which can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide burped by cows into the atmosphere – could reduce the country’s biogenic methane emissions by more than 50 percent.

It also sets an overall biogenic methane reduction target of 10 percent by 2030 – which Dairy NZ called “incredibly challenging” and a “big ask” for farmers, saying New Zealand milk already had the lowest carbon footprint in the world.

“We do remain concerned agriculture may be asked to do the heavy lifting if we don’t see urgent action to reduce CO2 emissions. We are all in this together and we must have a fair and balanced plan that requires our communities to contribute equally,” its chief executive Dr Tim Mackle said.

However, Larsson said there could have been strict limits on stock numbers, among other measures.

“We need to cut synthetic fertiliser and we need to cut imported feed and we need to support farmers to transition to regenerative and organic ways of farming.”

Hard-line approach in other sectors
Oxfam New Zealand campaign lead Alex Johnston said the commission was already taking more of a hard-line approach for other sectors.

“The pathways for reducing emissions in agriculture are simply not consistent with keeping to 1.5 degrees,” he said.

“Even if we go as hard as we can on transport and other sectors, if we don’t directly regulate emissions from agriculture and step up our actions in that area, then we’re not going to be able to do our fair share to contribute to this global problem.”

Forest & Bird spokesperson Geoff Keey agreed that agriculture was still getting “a bit of an easy ride” and the measures should be stricter, but he believed there was another blind spot in the report.

He wanted kelp and shellfish beds re-established on coastlines, and measures to stop wetlands drying out, to ensure more carbon did not go into the atmosphere.

“One of the big things that comes out of the report is once we start looking beyond 2030 and 2040, we’re going to need to protect our carbon stores in forests, in the sea and in wetlands. Right now the rules are not strong enough to allow that to happen,” he said.

Someone who felt more optimistic about the report was Niwa chief scientist Dr Sam Dean, who called it “a breath of fresh air”.

Traction on policies
He said there was finally traction on a more “comprehensive” range of climate policies.

“Up ’till now we’ve based our response on the emissions trading scheme, which is incentivised plantation and forestry. Moving away from that to a broader range of policies that are going to actually reduce emissions, especially carbon dioxide, is especially important. It’s something we’ve not managed to do, to date. And it’s something we’re going to have to do really quickly,” he said.

Dean said the difficult part was not writing the report – it was up to the government to rise to the challenge.

He said his plea for the government was to embrace all the recommendations with urgency and he challenged all New Zealanders to show their support and willingness to make changes.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The supposed end of the 20-year standoff between environmentalists and farmers was announced last week, with the release of the Interim Climate Change Committee’s report on “Action on agricultural emissions”. It was celebrated as an “historic consensus” between farmers and environmentalists, as the agricultural sector was agreeing to pay for part of their methane emissions.

Since then, however, the “devil in the detail” suggests that the situation is much more complicated and disputed than it might have first appeared. There now seems to be a long way to go before a real agreement or consensus is found for getting farmers to pay for emissions.

There should be no doubt that this new stage of discussions is significant. For the best overall coverage of what it all means, see Thomas Coughlan’s news report, Farmers exempt from 95 percent of emissions charges under new proposed rules.

This reports that a consensus now exists for farmers to pay for emissions by the year 2025, with the likelihood that each individual farmer will be brought into the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). As Coughlan explains, “The ETS works by forcing polluters to pay a price for their emissions, whilst paying a credit to owners of ‘carbon sinks’ like forests.”.

Coughlan reports that “Labour had campaigned on bringing agriculture into the ETS by 2020 with National claiming the push-back to 2025 was a ‘backdown’.” The reason for this backdown is mostly related to the technical issues. Farmers need to first be able to measure, manage and report those emissions.

According to David Prentice, the chair of the Government’s Interim Climate Change Committee (ICCC), “there is significant work involved in developing accounting and reporting systems to enable this… We estimate this to be at least five years off” – see RNZ’s Farmers propose agriculture sector-led approach to emissions plan.

With 2025 agreed upon as the earliest date to bring farmers into a permanent system of emissions payment – probably via the ETS – the main disagreement is currently about what to do in the meantime. The ICCC has put forward one proposal, involving levies to be charged on “processors” of agricultural products – such as Fonterra dairy factories. This money would be funnelled back into research on technologies to help farmers reduce emissions. This system would also involve rebates to farmers who achieve emission reductions.

The second proposal is put forward by farming groups, who want to pay for the research themselves via levies through their traditional sectoral groups. Submissions are now open for four weeks on these two proposals. But the Government has already indicated that it prefers the first option, recommended by the ICCC.

Farmers not keen on Emissions Trading Scheme

Although farmer groups have been reported as welcoming and being amenable to the new recommendations for agricultural emissions charges, the consensus doesn’t necessarily go much further. Certainly, the idea that in 2025 farmers will be part of the ETS is not accepted – see 1News’ Federated Farmers: We have not agreed to any Emissions Trading Scheme.

As this item reports, “Speaking this morning to TVNZ1’s Breakfast programme, Federated Farmers CEO Terry Copeland clarified that while his organisation has agreed to work with the Government to reduce climate change, it has not joined any ETS.”

The traditional “farmer’s friend”, the National Party, is also opposing farming being simply incorporated into the ETS. For example, today one senior National MP is clearly stating that farmers shouldn’t be in the ETS – see: Judith Collins: Government has thrown Kiwi farmers ‘under a bus’.

Richard Harman also reports: “yesterday, Leader Simon Bridges was saying National opposed farming going into the ETS or any levy system until farmers had the technological and mitigation tools that would enable them to reduce their emissions. The party’s Climate Change spokesperson, Todd Muller, said that the Government was saying they had reached a historic agreement with the sector on a five-year work programme before on-farm pricing was established” – see: Now it gets hard – making farmers pay for methane.

Also, according to Harman, “96.5 per cent of Federated Farmers Members have responded to a Feds survey saying they would oppose farming being part of the ETS without significant conditions.”

The Business NZ lobby group is also putting forward the arguments against farmers being too heavily hit by emissions pricing, with its chief executive, Kirk Hope, saying it’s too early: “The problem for farmers is that there is no way currently for them to reduce emissions other than by reducing stock numbers. Science and technology will provide solutions over time – low emission breeds, low emission feed –  but those technologies are not here yet” – see: The risks for farming from emissions charging agreement.

Hope also argues that an overly-aggressive pricing system for farmers would create overall negative outcomes: “If New Zealand’s agricultural production declined as a result of emissions policies, the gap would easily be filled by less efficient agricultural producers overseas. The overall result would be higher global emissions, higher food prices globally, and a poorer New Zealand.”

Consumers are also like to face higher costs as a result, according to Gerard Hutching’s article, Farmers’ greenhouse gas emissions bill will lead to higher food prices. He also points out that the current prices being considered by the Government could rise quite significantly. Examining the prices, Hutching says that based on the current price of carbon ($25/tonne) the average dairy farmer would pay about $2000 a year, and the average beef and sheep farmer about $1000. But many think the price of carbon will rise as high as about $200, leading to about a $20,000 annual payment for the average dairy farm.

And although this is all based on the notion of farmers paying only five per cent of the costs of emissions, Mike Hosking suggests that this rate is likely to rise: “It’s like tax or tolls, once you get the sign off, they do nothing but increase or go up. And so it will be with farmers. Now that they have a sweetheart deal at 95 per cent, that number will only ever go down. Getting them to sign isn’t the end goal, making them pay like everyone else is” – see: Climate change – how can five per cent be a pass rate for farmers emissions deal?.

Criticisms from environmentalists

Although there’s been plenty of celebrations about the consensus, a number of environmentalists are unimpressed by what is being proposed by the Government, and even less impressed with the reaction of farming leaders.

In his article above, Thomas Coughlan reports that the pricing level for emissions by farmers is a “sweetheart deal” because Labour has agreed with New Zealand First to cap that pricing at only five per cent of the cost of those emissions – essentially providing farmers with a 95 per cent subsidy on those pollutants. In practice, “That would equate to a charge of just $0.01c per kilogram of milk solids and $0.01 cent per kg of beef at the current ETS price of $25 a tonne of carbon.”

Is that enough to push farmers to find ways to reduce emissions? Not according to Greenpeace’s Russel Norman: “It’s truly astounding that the strongest option put forward by the Government to deal with our biggest emitter is to delay action for another two years, after which agribusiness will pay a paltry 5 percent of their emissions” – see Zane Small’s Jacinda Ardern defends ‘laughable’ 5 percent tax proposed on farming emissions.

Norman also labels the proposed emission price as “laughable” and says Agriculture must be immediately brought fully into the ETS so that New Zealand’s biggest polluters are finally forced to start paying for their massive climate bill.

The same article quotes Victoria University of Wellington Professor of Climate Change, Dave Frame, agreeing with Norman, calling the level of pricing a “poor idea” and saying “The price implied by the ICCC’s recommended approach is too small a disincentive against further expansion of the dairy herd, because the price is simply too small to change behaviour.”

Similarly, blogger No Right Turn says that the Government’s pricing proposals allow for a continued free pass for fertiliser use, which is a big part of the problem, and should be discouraged through environmental pricing: “rather than subsidising farmers to produce this gas, we should instead be making them pay the full price of the emissions it causes – and removing the artificial cap on ETS prices so that the price can increase to its natural level. Farmers will no doubt complain that if they have to pay the full cost, they’ll have to stop using it” – see: We should not subsidise fertiliser emissions.

A proper market signal about the environmental costs of fertiliser would help ensure it is used wisely: “If there are high-value uses which justify the emissions cost, then they’ll be able to afford to keep using it (or they’ll make out like bandits by switching to alternatives). But for low-value uses, like fertilising marginal grass to grow cows and pollute rivers, we are all better off if people stop doing that.”

Farmers have therefore managed to win some big concessions in their negotiations with the Government, and economist Rod Oram is extremely unhappy, saying “The red meat and dairy sectors are holding New Zealand’s economy, climate, natural environment and international reputation hostage to the political power of the lowest common denominator in their ranks” – see: ‘Let true farming leaders lead’.

Oram argues that although farmers have expressed basic support for paying for emissions, they want only tiny reductions, plus lots of money from the government to pay for this. Therefore, he concludes: “If these are the only climate commitments dairy and meat leaders can come up with the Government and country can’t afford to leave farming’s future and ours in the hands of those leaders.”

Finally, for satire on climate change, see my blog post, Recent cartoons about the environment in New Zealand.

By Jessica Marshall in Auckland

The Solomon Islands faces a “time bomb” with a youth unemployment rate of 82 percent and New Zealand needs to do more to help the Pacific country, says former Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Youth unemployment is “one of the huge challenges of our time”, she says.

“They’ve all got ideas, they want to do things, and . . . I really urge our aid programme to focus back on some of these basics again,” she told the annual conference of the National Council of Women (NCW) in Auckland yesterday.

READ MORE: Violence against women is a national crisis: Clark

Clark, former Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is the new patron of NCW and is the author of a new book launched this weekend, Women, Equality, Power.

She said the New Zealand government needed to rethink how its aid programme was structured.

-Partners-

“A country like the Solomon Islands could have a future but it needs investment in its agriculture.”

She said New Zealand used to invest its aid programme – in places like Thailand, for example – in the country’s agriculture.

“How much focus have we got on agriculture now?” she asked.

‘No brainer’
“It’s just a no brainer to try to support people back into the value chain.”

She made the call during a discussion on the UN Sustainable Development Goals which Clark was instrumental in developing during her time with UNDP.

Dr Gill Greer, chief executive of NCW, said that the inclusive manner in which Clark went about developing the goals was “not typical of the UN at many times”.

“It was a vision, it is a vision,” said Dr Greer, adding that the goals did not go far enough on the issue of gender.

“The living framework has one indicator, and that is all, and in this room [of 200 people] just think of how many we could suggest immediately?”

Clark replied: “Gender is in every goal”.

Clark also discussed the issue of migrants in Nauru, proclaiming it to be a crisis.

“There is something fundamentally wrong, this is not a sustainable situation and it’s no way to treat people.”

Earlier yesterday, the BBC reported that children had been attempting suicide and self-harm on the island.

The Pacific Islands Forum leaders summit opens in Nauru tomorrow.

Jessica Marshall is a student journalist on AUT’s Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies (Journalism) course.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Weekly Overview is written by Tony Alexander, Chief Economist at the Bank of New Zealand. The views expressed are my own and do not purport to represent the views of the BNZ. This edition has been solely moderated by Tony Alexander. To receive the Weekly Overview each Thursday night please sign up at www.tonyalexander.co.nz

By Glenda Willie in Port Vila

Vanuatu kava farmers on Espiritu Santo have expressed great fear of losing their production businesses in the wake of reports alleging that investors will be engaging in mass kava production on their land.

In a press statement, the kava farmers and suppliers said if the investors engaged in kava production on a larger commercial scale, they would outnumber the hard-working local farmers and dominate kava outlets with their production.

Describing this as a “silent killer” for their small-scale kava businesses, the concerned farmers called on the government through the minister responsible for labour to reconsider the working permits for those investors.

The local farmers are worried that their years of hard work would be in vain if this issue is not addressed immediately.

They claim that they will not be able to compete with the investors in terms of kava quantity.

“Kava is considered a traditional drink therefore the government should consider this as a priority to assist the farmers to protect the value of kava before they fall into the hands of investors,” they said.

The kava farmers said they would do their best to protect and defend their kava businesses as most of them rely on their businesses to sustain their livelihood.

Glenda Willie is a Vanuatu Daily Post reporter.