Coronavirus curveball for Climate Change Commission
Covid-19 has thrown a curveball at the new Climate Change Commission as it begins work on New Zealand's first carbon budget. The commission has until February 1 to say how much greenhouse gas New Zealand can afford to pump out between 2022 and 2025, and still get on track to be carbon neutral by 2050. While emissions cuts won't necessarily be spread evenly across the 28-odd years we have before the deadline, putting off too much of the hard work for later will reduce the chances of meeting the target, said the Climate Commission's inaugural chair, Rod Carr. Some of the major questions the commission will be trying to answer are: "How fast can the economy as a whole transition, and who benefits, and where do the costs fall," said Jo Hendy, the commission's chief executive. READ MORE: * Powerful climate commissioners appointed * Emotional Dr Rod Carr says family pushed him to take top climate role * Climate Change Commission: How it will work and the initial plans But answering these questions requires modelling what people are likely to do, and buy and invest in, over the coming years. That just became a lot more complicated. "It's really unhelpful that the price of oil has gone so low so fast because it really does undermine the business case for some alternative technologies," Carr said. "It's really unhelpful that the government and business balance sheets are going to be hollowed out [by surviving Covid]." "On the other hand, we may find some infrastructure investments that governments around the world make will accelerate the transition. It's too early to say." PUBLIC INPUT By law, the commission is required to talk to people as it comes up with its recommendations - it can't just rely on desktop models, or consult people after it already has a plan in mind. The decision-making panel is made up of Carr and six commissioners, and they and their staff will be taking input from the public over the next few months. Anyone is invited to contact the commission , and staff have already contacted some youth groups, business groups, iwi groups and others. A series of physical meetings and hui should be happening now, but public engagement has had to go online until the lockdown is lifted. Carr and Hendy said one-on-one meetings and group workshops would continue with different industries and interest groups and anyone else with information to share for much of the rest of the year. The public process will end with a formal round of consultation in October and November, once the commission has drafted its proposed recommendations. Its report to the government is due on February 1, 2021. When it comes to getting modelling and technical reports, the commissioners will be drawing on four small teams of in-house analysts, who've been pulled from jobs both overseas and at a range of government departments, including Treasury and the ministries for transport, environment and primary industries. These analysts will work in four teams: one doing the overarching modelling, and one covering each of the three main emissions sectors (land and waste; transport; and heat, industry and power). Their job has just become more difficult, as lockdowns and virus-related disruption change virtually every aspect of life. "The hardest thing is actually the next five years," Carr said. "It gets a little easier as you get out to 2030 because, whatever happens as a result of Covid-19, we will know [by then]." Right now, he said: "Nobody can tell us if we will have a V-shaped bounce back, where everything goes back to its former trend within a year, or a much longer period in which behaviour in society will change. "You'd be brave to put your hand up now and say, 'I know we're all going to work from home and drive less ... nobody will be on a cruise liner again in my lifetime, or everybody's going to hunker down and shop locally'," Carr said. "After the Christchurch earthquakes, there were people who were desperate to get life back to the way it was and others who wanted a transformation, and it played out as a bit of both. I think the same will happen with Covid-19 - the trick is picking out which bits." UNDER SCRUTINY The commission's team of experts will be drawing on expertise from three Technical Reference Groups , which are in turn drawn from research bodies, industry and others. Already, the composition of these groups is under scrutiny. Greenpeace has written to the Climate Commission to express concern that the groups are stacked towards the status quo and won't generate the change that is needed. Greenpeace agricultural campaigner Genevieve Toop said the reference group for land and waste was over-weighted to big farming entities and businesses associated with intensive agriculture, and lacked voices from regenerative agriculture or organic farming. The organisations represented on the Technical Reference Group for Land and Waste are: Crown-owned science company Scion, Fonterra, Beef & Lamb, Ngai Tahu farming, Agrioptics (a precision agriculture company), Horticulture New Zealand, Lincoln University, Rabobank, Crown-owned science company Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, and He Oranga mo Nga Uri Tuku Iho Trust. Toop asked the commission to reconsider its choices. "The decisions the commission has taken about who to include and exclude from this advisory group represent a missed opportunity for the commission to engage with the leading experts on the transition to climate-friendly food and fibre production," she said. "This pattern has to stop if we're serious about making the changes required to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises." However, Carr said the groups were selected for their deep knowledge of their sectors today, and were not an indication of where the commission saw industries going in the future. They had no power to approve the commission's advice or recommendations, he said. "They are not advocacy groups and they are not stakeholder advisory groups, they are there because they know what happens in detail in some of these sectors. That is the advice we are looking for the team to get from them," he said. The groups would be used as sounding boards to test some of the assumptions in the modelling about where industries were now and what they were working on, Carr said. "You have to start with a deep understanding of where we are, before we look at where we'd like to be. "They are not the only channel to us." The government will have most of next year to decide whether to adopt the commission's recommended budget before it is due to take effect at the start of 2022. After that, a further five budgets, each one lasting five years, will chart New Zealand's path to 2050.