Talking about climate change #19

Where do we stand? (7 minute read)

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How shall we save this land

for our children...

Rangi Faith

This months’s talking about climate change was prompted by a post from my friends at Climate Club, who looked at the contribution of small countries to climate change (short answer – all together, we add up to a lot). It started me thinking – where do we stand in terms of emissions? I know that in absolute terms our contribution is small, but how do we rank per person?

It turns out that this isn’t a simple question. There are a number of different ways to measure emissions and other aspects of environmental performance. So, this month, I dive into the world of rankings.

How much do we emit?

There are a number of different ways to count emissions. The one which gets talked about the most is the greenhouse gas inventory (often written as GHG inventory). This is the figure that we report to the United Nations each year. It is used to monitor our progress against what we have committed to do.

The whole greenhouse gas inventory for New Zealand is a 500 page report, which is available if you want to read it, but I’m not going to volunteer. However, there’s an excellent summary on the Ministry for the Environment website. The summary gives the main figures but also puts them into context internationally. There’s also a diagram at the start if you just want a quick overview.

New Zealand's Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990–2021 snapshot | Ministry for the Environment (20 minute read)

The greenhouse gas inventory looks at the emissions New Zealand is directly producing as a country. It counts the methane from our cows, regardless of who eats the dairy products they produce, but it doesn’t count all the emissions that went into making the cars, phones, clothing and everything else we import.

To see how New Zealand ranks internationally, there are a number of different websites you can look at. I’ve picked out one which I find particularly useful, from the United Nations Environment Programme. It has a series of graphics which show you the total emissions, emissions per person and how emissions have changed over time. If you dig into it, you can see that most wealthy countries have started to decrease their emissions, but that New Zealand has not. However, we are better than Canada and Australia. They’ve both had much greater increases than New Zealand since 1990.

UNEP Climate Action Note | Data you need to know

If you like a closer look at the data, there are a couple of options. Our World in Data is normally a good website, but to find total greenhouse gas emissions, you need to scroll right to the bottom of the page.

New Zealand: CO2 Country Profile - Our World in Data

As an alternative, you can look at the OECD website, which gives in-depth data for wealthy countries. This website suggests that New Zealand is among the highest-emitting wealthy countries per person, but behind the USA, Canada and Australia.

Greenhouse gas emissions (oecd.org)

But there are other ways to count emissions. One method is to look at consumption – which counts the emissions which went into making the things we import, but not our exports.

Our World in Data has information on consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions. New Zealand is still a high emitter, but what is most interesting is how different countries have changed. We have had a very small decrease in our consumption-based emissions since 1990, but it’s much less than most other wealthy countries. New Zealand is sitting between Australia and Belgium, two other wealthy countries who have failed to make meaningful cuts to consumption.

Per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissions - Our World in Data

Historical emissions

There’s one more method of looking at emissions that I want to mention. This is looking at the total contribution over time – the amount that each country has contributed to the current climate change we are experiencing. There’s a very interesting analysis from Carbon Brief which looks at this topic in some depth. About halfway through, there’s a shocking table, which gives the per person figures calculated in two different ways. The figure is shocking, because, using one calculation method, New Zealand is ranked first.

Analysis: Which countries are historically responsible for climate change? - Carbon Brief (29 minute read)

Yes, you read that correctly. According to some calculations, New Zealand has made the highest per person contribution to climate change. Why? The reason is that during the latter part of the 19th century a small population of European settlers destroyed almost all of New Zealand’s lowland forest and a good proportion of the upland forest as well. Although the forest was logged, most of the destruction was by burning, which releases massive quantities of stored carbon.

Abel Tasman National Park. We market this as pristine to tourists, but I can tell by looking at the plants on those hills that the area has been burned repeatedly (image credit: Melanie Newfield)

To give you an idea of just how significant this was, I’ve put together a comparison with other countries with similar population sizes to New Zealand. This shows emissions due to fossil fuels as well as emissions due to deforestation and agriculture. It doesn’t look good. The only positive thing I can say is that when we stopped logging our native forest and started reducing our livestock numbers, around 1980, it made a real difference.

Here’s the link if you want to play with the data.

Global warming contributions from 1851 to 2021 (ourworldindata.org)

Obviously, the people who destroyed New Zealand’s forest didn’t know anything about climate change. Nor did they realise the catastrophic impact they would have on New Zealand’s waterways and soil (more about that in a week or two). But I do want to recognise that what happened was disastrous. It was a disaster for our environment and I can’t imagine what it must have been like for those who were inhabiting the land before the settlers arrived. And the country and people are still paying the price, because the flooding seen during Cyclone Gabrielle was a direct consequence of that land clearance (this is something I discuss in my upcoming interview with erosion scientist Chris Phillips, which will be out in the next few weeks).

What are we doing about it?

We’ve looked at current and historical emissions, but what about the future? How well is New Zealand set up to reduce emissions? A couple of organisations have developed approaches to assess policies and actions.

A group based in Germany produces the Climate Change Performance Index, which looks at a country’s emissions, sources of energy and climate change policy to produce an overall rating. Of the sixty or so countries they have ranked, New Zealand sits about the middle. We’re better than the United States, Australia and Canada, but we are worse than most of the European Union countries, as well as number of less wealthy countries like Indonesia and Colombia.

Ranking | Climate Change Performance Index (ccpi.org)

Another group has produced a different tool for evaluating countries, known as the climate action tracker. This tool rates countries according to what they have promised to do, what they have acutally done, and whether they are making a fair contribution in proportion to their wealth. It doesn’t produce an absolute ranking, but assigns countries to four categories – there is a fifth, but no country has done well enough to meet the criteria. New Zealand, unfortunately, is in the second-worst group, alongside Canada and China, better than Russia, but actually worse than the USA and Australia. Seriously, are we going to let Australia do a better job than us on climate change?

Countries | Climate Action Tracker

What about other aspects of the environment?

The news doesn’t get better when we look at the environment more broadly. Yale University has produced a tool called the Environmental Performance Index. This considers greenhouse gas emissions, along with other measures of environmental health. Since they’ve ranked 180 countries, it doesn’t sound so bad that New Zealand is ranked at 26^th. But Australia is 17^th and most other wealthy countries are ahead of us, with the USA and Canada notable exceptions. But what is most worrying is that we have got worse over the last 10 years, whereas two thirds of countries have improved their environment performance.

Environmental Performance Index | Environmental Performance Index (yale.edu)

If you are interested in looking at statistics for climate change and the environment, it’s well-worth subscribing to Hannah Ritchie’s newsletter, Sustainability by Numbers. Hannah works for Our World in Data, so she’s really got her head around crunching the numbers to tell interesting stories.

Sustainability by numbers | Hannah Ritchie | Substack

This month’s climate poem

This month, I’ve stayed close to home in looking for a climate change poem, after Nadine Anne Hura reminded me that I’ve mostly used overseas poems. The poem I’ve chosen speaks to me, because it captures the sense of wonder that comes from gazing at the sky far from any city lights. You may notice that the poem was written in Takapō, and wonder where that is. I looked it up and discovered that the name I know, Lake Tekapo, is a misspelling of the original name, which is Takapō.

Starlight Reserve – AKO (akojournal.org.nz)

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