Primary sector climate action partnership He Waka Eke Noa programme director Kelly Forster told the recent agriculture climate change conference in Wellington that although the programme’s goals are ambitious, farmers are buying into the concepts, progress is being made and work on emissions pricing options will be publicly available by late October or November.
Forster says He Waka Eke Noa’s mission is to implement a framework by 2025 to reduce agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and build the sector’s resilience to climate change.
That has three core parts: empowering farmers and growers to measure, manage and reduce on-farm emissions; that they can recognise, maintain and increase integrated sequestration on-farm; and can adapt to a changing climate.
“This is all in the context of a sustainable and competitive food and fibre sector, not at the expense of it,” Forster said.
She says central to that is supporting farmers to know their GHG emissions and their sources of emissions; to understand mitigations – the levers they can pull to reduce those emissions; and to have an incentive to do so.
The goal is that by 2025 all farmers and growers have included climate change in their farm plans and are annually calculating their GHG emissions and sinks, along with taking action to reduce or offset their emissions.
Several milestones have been included in the Climate Change Response Act that must be reached as part of that goal.
On farm planning, the first milestone was to develop GHG guidance for farm plans by the end of last year. Box ticked.
Forster says the next goal is that by the end of this year or the start of next year, 25% of farmers need GHGs included in their farm plans, getting to 100% by 2025.
“On emissions reporting, we’re working towards 100% of farmers knowing their GHG emissions number by the end of 2022,” she said.
There is also a milestone in terms of having a farm-level accounting emissions and reporting system – an emissions pricing system – in place by 2025.
On the way to that milestone, He Waka Eke Noa must make recommendations on an alternative pricing mechanism for the ETS to the Agriculture and Climate Change ministers in March next year.
“The Climate Change Commission will be assessing progress on this programme, towards these milestones,” she said.
“If progress is deemed insufficient, there is an alternative interim step of processor-level pricing that can be switched on.”
For the purposes of the 2021 and 2022 milestones, the definition of a farm, or farms that must know their number, is farms of more than 80ha. That includes pastoral, horticultural and arable farms, dairy herds with a supply number and feedlots, as defined in the freshwater regulations.
That’s about 25,000 farms capturing 97.3% of emissions from livestock and nitrogen fertiliser use in the ag sector.
Currently about 10,000 of those 25,000 farmers know their numbers, with 88% of dairy farmers having received a GHG report.
Forster says DairyNZ is supporting farmers to understand that number through its Step Change programme and Beef +Lamb NZ will roll-out its GHG calculator this month.
Tools are also being developed for use by HortNZ and the Foundation for Arable Research.
The aim of the emissions pricing part of the programme is to design a farm-level pricing system that forms part of a broader behaviour change framework, recognising that price is only one of the things that will drive change.
“The pricing system should incentivise farmers and growers to reduce GHG emissions and increase integrated sequestration,” she said.
“It should contribute to reducing GHG emissions in line with our targets and support a sustainable and competitive NZ agricultural sector.
“It also needs to be workable, implementable, practical, aligned with other government and industry objectives, and be consistent with our Treaty of Waitangi obligations.”
There are several key questions He Waka Eke Noa is looking at as it develops its recommendations, including how different GHGs should be treated; how emissions are estimated and reported; how on-farm sequestration can be recognised or used to offset an emissions price; how to incorporate nature-based solutions; whether farmers can form groups for emissions; and how should revenue generated through a pricing mechanism be used.
“We currently have a shortlist of policy options to price emissions and incentivise carbon sequestration, but there are a lot of ways to skin this cat and the devil is definitely in the detail in terms of designing a pricing mechanism,” she said.
Forster says He Waka Eke Noa is a programme aimed at significant change and its success is important for future sustainability and growth in the ag and hort sectors.
“One thing that strikes me about what’s ambitious about this programme is when I was talking to a group of Waikato farmers a couple of years ago, one of the farmers said ‘this is Star Trek stuff’,” she said.
“What this programme will see is taking it from Star Trek stuff to mainstreaming understanding GHG emissions in farm business decision-making.”
