Friday, March 29, 2024

FROM THE RIDGE: Climate report is admirable – but

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The Climate Change Commission’s (CCC) report came out in late January. Now, it’s up for reflection and a consultation period for the next six weeks.
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It could have been worse, but still has some challenges for our sector.

Primarily the advice from the commission is that there should be a further 15% reduction in sheep, cattle and dairy numbers.

There is no recognition that the sheep and beef sector has already achieved a 30% reduction in emissions since 1990 due to lowering stock numbers and greatly improved efficiencies on those that are left due to productivity gains.

There could be a case here where dairy, whose numbers have dramatically increased and are seeing good current returns, should be the sector doing the heavy lifting rather than sheep and beef.

Mind you, in their defence, the report out a couple of weeks ago showed that their carbon emissions per kilo of food produced are the lowest in the world, so if they did reduce production, that production would occur elsewhere with a higher carbon emission.

Wheels within wheels.

Much has been spoken that the experience of the covid-19 pandemic should force a reset in the way we do things.

If we are serious about reducing carbon emissions, then we have just had a massive opportunity handed to us on a plate.

For the last decade we have heard a constant praise of the tourism sector and the billions of dollars that it has brought to the economy.

Several years ago, I was a guest speaker at the Smaller Milk and Supply Herds (SMASH) conference.

Economist Brendan O’Donovan, who is great, was also there. He talked about these returns from tourism and I made the point that surely the touted returns should be netted of the capital that is exported by Kiwis travelling abroad, given there were three million jetting off for a bit of OE, while nearly four million visitors came here in 2019.

My point being that we exported the majority of food we grew and imported relatively little in exchange, so the net result was that the primary sector had a much greater positive effect for the economy than tourism. He disagreed and not wanting to argue with someone who knew much more on these matters, I let it go.

However, we have recently seen New Zealanders’ domestic tourism pick up much of the slack from none of those four million visitors turning up, although that spend is lumpy and much of it tied to school holidays.

Now, back to looking at ways of dramatically reducing carbon emissions.

In November 2018, the Government put out a draft tourism strategy and it highlighted the greatest threat was a large drop in visitors as they became aware of the emissions they produced and because governments are wanting to go to a low-carbon emission economy. No mention of the risks of a global pandemic, which was to start within a year of that report. Just goes to show that the futurist report writers can miss the genuine big risks very easily. Should they refund their fee?

It is estimated that about six million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions were created by incoming tourists and I’ll guess four million by Kiwis travelling offshore.

There is no such thing as sustainable international tourism. Not when you live at the end of the world.

Because no one is going anywhere due to covid-19, we have suddenly cut emissions by around 10m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year that this pandemic continues.

Good work one might think, but neither the commission’s report or government is advocating maintaining this drop, but instead looking at other ways of doing so.

Naturally, our tourism sector has tens of thousands of jobs, thousands of businesses and large amounts of GDP and tax revenue at stake, so it is no wonder this current cut in emissions is not being discussed.

But why not if we are serious about reducing our carbon emissions?

If I were in the tourism sector, I too would want things to get back to where they were.

These 10m tonnes of carbon dioxide emission decline might only be a short-term gain.

Instead, this country is considering reducing numbers of the most efficient classes of stock on the planet to achieve our carbon goals.

Killing the goose that lays the golden egg maybe?

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