(Bloomberg) -- Announcing her surprise resignation last week, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the country is “in a fundamentally different place on climate change” than it was before she took office in 2017, “with ambitious targets and a plan to achieve them.”
Ardern established a new policy framework for New Zealand to address global warming and is viewed internationally as a climate champion. But at home, there’s a sense that her government failed to deliver fully on its climate promises.
The legacy of the outgoing PM on climate is mixed, says Luke Harrington, senior lecturer in climate change at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. The climate policy infrastructure she set up will last generations, he said. But often, “she passed on opportunities to show genuinely transformational leadership.”
Even before she was elected, Ardern described climate change as the challenge of her generation, and as premier she frequently stressed the urgent need to take action, once calling the stakes “life or death.”
In 2019 she pushed through the Zero Carbon Act, aiming to cut New Zealand’s emissions from greenhouse gases other than methane to net zero by 2050. The same law also set reduction targets for methane emissions and established an independent climate change commission to advise the government and monitor its performance.
Her government also banned offshore exploration for oil and gas, subsidized electric vehicles and moved to replace coal-fired boilers at government-run schools and hospitals. It set a goal of 100% renewable power generation by 2030 and for the first time released a climate risk assessment, emissions reduction plan and adaptation plan.
Additionally, New Zealand became the first country to require financial institutions to disclose climate-related risks and opportunities.
Harrington calls these important achievements and “long overdue.” Yet some were later weakened, he says, by pragmatic concessions. For example, with the offshore oil and gas exploration ban in place, Ardern’s government then issued multiple onshore permits.
New Zealand’s climate change minister, James Shaw, is the co-leader of the Green Party, which made a deal to support Ardern’s Labour Party short of forming a coalition with it. He has expressed frustration with the government’s progress.
Lou Sanson, acting chief executive officer of WWF New Zealand, said that although climate policy improved under Ardern, “we still fall far short of where we need to be to meet our obligations to cut emissions.”
Agriculture is a pillar of the New Zealand economy, and farm emissions make up a large share of the nation’s total. Ardern’s efforts last year to tackle them faltered in the face of opposition from farmers. A compromise agreement, including a tax on methane, disappointed the hopes of environmentalists.
Jason Myers, the executive director of Oxfam Aotearoa, singled out among the achievements of Ardern’s government its commitment at COP27 to help developing countries recover from climate disasters and a pledge of NZD $1.3 billion for climate finance. But the group says New Zealand’s current plan to put a price on the climate pollution from agribusiness would only cut farm emissions 1% by 2030. It wants Ardern’s successor, Chris Hipkins, “to help farmers transition to more sustainable and regenerative practices.”
New Zealand’s gross greenhouse gas emissions have shown no sustained reductions compared to a 2005 baseline, according to the nation’s statistics agency. The latest available data show that in 2020, gross emissions were 3.5% lower than in 2019 — but that was due primarily to decreased emissions from road transport in a year of Covid-19 lockdowns.
New Zealand calculates its nationally defined contribution (NDC) to global emissions cuts using a gross-net accounting method that has been widely criticized. Using net-net calculations, its 2030 goal of a 50% cut is much more modest. And its path to getting there is largely dependent on offsets.
Climate Action Tracker, which tracks countries’ climate policies, classifies New Zealand’s as “highly insufficient” to meeting Paris Agreement targets. The Climate Change Performance Index, a monitoring tool produced by a consortium of German nonprofits, ranks New Zealand 33rd in the world on climate action, or “medium-performing.”
In 2021, activist Greta Thunberg criticized Ardern’s climate efforts as inadequate. “It’s funny that people believe Jacinda Ardern and people like that are climate leaders. That just tells you how little people know about the climate crisis,” she said.
While it’s too soon to gauge Hipkins’ climate credentials, his Labour Party and the main opposition National Party are now jockeying for the political middle ground ahead of what looks like a tight election in October. That means that whoever forms the next government, it is unlikely to be more progressive than Ardern’s on climate change.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
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