DAN MOSKOVITZ (HE/HIM)
Greater Wellington Regional Council is looking at scrapping its pledge to be climate-neutral by 2030 and climate-positive by 2035.
The council is instead investigating replacing these commitments with a pledge to be at net zero emissions by 2050, as decided at their recent Climate committee meeting. There are two main reasons for this—a lack of central government support, and things not progressing as quickly as hoped.
For example, in 2019 the council had budgeted on electric utes being widely available by 2030 to replace its fleet—they are not. Similarly, the council’s main reforestation project is proving both slower and more costly than expected. In addition, the Auditor-General, one of the chief crown watchdogs, has recently taken a stricter view on agencies claiming to be “carbon positive,” meaning crown entities now have stricter standards to adhere to.
“Experience since 2019 has revealed that we should continually monitor what we can achieve and in what timeframe,” said GWRC’s strategy group manager Luke Troy in a statement.
“We need to adjust our targets and timeframes to take into account the progress and benefits of reafforestation.
“Navigating the way forward on emissions target setting is challenging but necessary in a changing environment.”
The major contributor to the council’s emissions however is the Metlink public transport network. According to deputy chair of the Climate Committee, councilor Yadana Saw, decarbonization of the bus and train fleet—which makes up roughly 1% of the Wellington region’s entire emissions—was going well until central government pulled its support.
“$134 million across three years has been cut from our funding,” said Saw. “That's a significant amount of money which isn't going towards decarbonizing.”
“We’ve had to slow things down because the only other [financial] mechanism we have is to increase rates and we’ve already gone out with a 20.5% rate increase. And those were based on the assumption we’d have funding for public transport projects.”
Both Saw and Troy mention wanting to pivot from the council’s previous targets which were about net emissions, to looking towards gross emissions. Council's new proposed headline target is net-zero by 2050.
Net emissions include offsetting. This is essentially paying someone else to plant some trees and offset your carbon. The climate committee noted the offset market was in “disarray” after most offsets were found to be “hot air.”
Gross emissions by contrast are the sum total of all emissions. So a reduction to these can’t include offsetting.
“The best solution remains to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses that we create,” says Saw.
“So we’ll be looking at energy transitions, such as how we can utilize solar arrays around our Greater Wellington facilities.”
Saw also said Metlink’s buses would continue to be replaced with EVs, but that without central government support, it would be at a slower rate.
Notably, Greater Wellington released no press release regarding the committee’s decision to investigate dropping its climate-positive pledge.
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