Kate
Newton , Climate Change Correspondent
New
Zealand has been given the ignominious ‘Fossil of the Day’
award at the COP30 global climate summit, for its decision
to weaken methane emissions policies.
It’s the fourth
time in five years that New Zealand has received the dud
award, handed out by climate NGO Climate Action Network
International and designed to shame countries that block
progress at the annual talks.
New Zealand was last
named Fossil of the Day in
2023, for the National-led government’s decision to
reverse the ban on offshore oil and gas
exploration.
It has previously been given the award in
2022 for pushing
to delay setting up a loss and damage fund to compensate
poorer countries bearing the brunt of climate change-fuelled
extreme weather, and in
2021 for the then-Labour government’s decision not to
update New Zealand’s emissions target.
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Unlike carbon
dioxide, which warms the atmosphere for centuries, methane
is a short-lived gas but has huge warming
potential.
Reducing methane has attracted growing
attention as an ’emergency brake’ on warming while the world
works on technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and
remove them from the air.
But in October, the
government said it would lower
New Zealand’s methane emissions target, after a review
found that was sufficient to meet a controversial ‘no
additional warming’ goal.
It also scrapped an earlier
promise to introduce a price on agricultural methane by
2030.
Climate Action Network International said the
weakened methane target was “not science-based”.
“It
is certainly not consistent with the Paris Agreement or with
the [UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] principles
of equity and responsibility.”
About half of New
Zealand’s overall greenhouse gas emissions are methane
emissions – mostly produced by agriculture.
Climate
Change minister Simon Watts defended
the change in New Zealand’s methane policies before he
headed to COP30, being held in Belém, Brazil.
He said
reducing the size of New Zealand’s dairy herd was “not
economically rational” and he believed methane-inhibiting
technology being developed would be sufficient to meet the
new target, without a methane tax.
Greenpeace Aotearoa
spokesperson Amanda Larsson said the latest Fossil of the
Day award was “embarrassing but it’s sadly not
surprising”.
“Fossil of the Day is the award no
country wants to receive, and today, the shame of receiving
it is on Christopher Luxon’s Government, who are weakening
the requirements for our most polluting industry to take
action on climate change.”
Larsson said the change to
the target followed agriculture industry lobbying and
directly contradicted advice from the Climate Change
Commission to strengthen the methane target.
The ‘no
additional warming’ target – which aims to get New Zealand’s
methane emissions back to 2017 levels, was an “accounting
trick”, Larsson said.
“Other major livestock producers
will be looking to us to see whether this approach is
worthwhile. Our government has just lit the fuse on a global
methane race to the bottom – once one domino falls, others
will follow.”
Earlier in the week, University of
Canterbury professor of physics David Frame told RNZ it was
“a good idea” to work on methane, “but only if this is
additional to [carbon dioxide] mitigation”.
New
Zealand remains a signatory to the Global Methane Pledge,
which aims to lower methane emissions by 30 percent from
2020 levels by 2030.
Frame, who served on the
independent panel that was tasked with finding an emissions
range consistent with ‘no additional warming’, said if the
world as a whole adopted ‘no additional warming’ as a
target, methane emissions would drop by four percent over
the next decade.
“That would be progress compared with
actual trends.”
New Zealand was not incentivising
agricultural methane emissions reductions as well as it
could, though.
“We should… explore a [low] price on
methane emissions, because it’s among the best-justified and
most effective policy approaches,” he said.
“This
government may have ruled out a methane price, but
governments are like buses – there are new ones along from
time to time. Good ideas have a habit of hanging around
until someone tries
them.”
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