I am not proud of my country.

There are many things I love about New Zealand: our mountains, our beaches, our accents, our culture, our wildlife – but our climate policy is not one of them.

It’s Day 5 here at COP and not much has happened in the negotiations. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. But I find myself becoming, inexplicably, angry. To be precise, I’m becoming angry at New Zealand. It’s not even about anything in particular that we’ve done. Rather, it’s about what we’ve not done – and about our long-held positions here at the UNFCCC.

Three things in particular stand out to me: targets, bounded flexibility, and climate finance.

Targets

New Zealand’s first target under the Kyoto Protocol was to reduce our emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Amazingly, we met this target – but only because we counted the carbon temporarily absorbed by a boom in commercial pine plantations, which are due for harvest from around 2020. Our total greenhouse gas emissions are now 22% higher than in 1990.

We are now aiming to reduce our net emissions in 2020 to 5% below 1990 levels. However, we will miserably fail to meet this goal. By 2020, net emissions are predicted to jump to 27-30% above the 1990 gross emissions level.

Even if this target were to be met, it would still fall far short of what is required to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

Our current policies will reduce total emissions by just 0.4% by 2030 compared with taking no action at all – and at this rate we will blow through our per capita share of the remaining global carbon budget before 2030.

Here at COP we often hear the rhetoric of countries doing their “fair share”. It’s hard to quantify what our fair share is, exactly. But when even big and notoriously laggardly emitters such as the US have submitted better targets than us, it’s hard to justify our position. It’s clear that we are not actually holding up our end of the deal.

Bounded Flexibility

These negotiations have seen a proposal put forward by New Zealand in the spotlight. New Zealand proposes that countries each table a nationally determined intended contribution (ie how much they are prepared to reduce their emissions by), which will not be legally binding. The idea is that ambition of mitigation commitments will be increased over time from the beginning of the agreement until its purpose is achieved, subject to force majeure. Countries will be free to opt in and out whenever they like. The main argument for non-legally binding targets is that without the fear of being held to international law, governments are more likely to shoot for an ambitious emissions target. In addition, it is more likely that countries such as the US will be able to ratify the agreement if the targets are non binding.

In short, this proposal is awful. Non-binding targets mean that there is absolutely no accountability in the process – it’s the legal equivalent of the Wild West. There is no incentive for countries to live up to their stated commitments. There is no guarantee of getting to 2 degrees – it’s just talk, rhetoric. What would happen if our domestic laws weren’t legally binding?

Climate Finance

So far, New Zealand has committed $3 million to the Green Climate Fund. This is a pittance compared to New Zealand’s aid budget of $550 million, or our defence budget of $100 million.

To justify its position, New Zealand says that it wants to focus on mitigation, rather than adaptation. It’s true that mitigation is important, as the more we mitigate, the less need there will be to adapt. However, this view is simply not just. It is pure luck that we in New Zealand will not feel the effects of climate change as much as in other countries. Adaptation is vitally important from a climate justice perspective.

A common reason given for our inaction is that at less than 0.2% of the global total, New Zealand’s emissions are so small that it will make little or no measurable difference to the climate whether we reduce them or not. Although this is undeniably true, inaction is simply not a smart strategy. By not acting, we are missing out on important economic opportunities from positioning ourselves early. In addition, failure to act simply goes against basic moral intuitions. Everyone is affected, and everyone’s actions matter.

There are many more things I could criticise, such as the fact that the New Zealand Government has allowed the carbon price to crash to near zero, and the National Government’s total gutting of the Emissions Trading Scheme. But this blog post is long enough and my stream of anger is running out.

In conclusion, I urge our government to up its ambition and ditch its proposal for bounded flexibility. New Zealanders deserve better. Then I might have something to be proud of.