The NZ Climate Change Centre has highlighted the IPCC’s chapter on Australasia, which says NZ continues to demonstrate long-term trends toward higher surface air and sea-surface temperatures, more hot extremes and fewer cold extremes, and changed rainfall patterns.
University of Canterbury School of Forestry’s Professor Euan Mason said the latest report painted a sobering picture of the future if greenhouse gas emissions weren’t reduced substantially.
The burden of climate change would be borne primarily by those least able, the poor, and unless we rose to the challenge future generations would condemn us for our failure, Mason said.
“NZ, in particular, is not pulling its weight in response to climate change. Our per capita emissions are among the fastest-rising in the world, and our emissions trading scheme (ETS) is failing because of poor policy and so we have had to withdraw from the second commitment period of the Kyoto agreement in order to avoid penalties.
“With the right policy settings and with some relatively simple changes to our ETS we could become fully greenhouse gas neutral if we chose to. That we choose instead to do less than our share to solve the problem is shameful.”
Victoria University’s Judy Lawrence said the IPCC Working Group II assessment highlighted key climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, including for NZ.
Lawrence, who is adjunct research associate at NZ Climate Change Research Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, said even though the magnitude of some climate change risks might appear smaller in NZ than overseas, this country was under-prepared for climate change.
Institutionally NZ’s devolved planning system left each local government to fend for itself, without much centralised support, she said.
Scientifically, there was only a patchy picture of where the highest risks lay and who were the most vulnerable.
Both those issues needed to be addressed to assess what was at risk and what range of options there were for addressing the risks, she said.
Professor James Renwick, from the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University, said the report painted a clear picture of what the future could hold for humanity if it didn't get on top of greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the biggest issues was sea level rise and associated hazards, he said.
“Every 10cm of rise triples the risk of a given inundation event and we are expecting something like a metre of rise this century.
“That would mean today's 1-in-100-year event occurs at least annually at many NZ coastal locations. NZ has a great deal of valuable property and infrastructure close to the coast that will be increasingly at risk as time goes on.”
The other main risks were to food security and water availability from changing rainfall patterns, heat waves and extreme events, he said.
The report said many problems already existed – such as food and water shortages and political and military conflict – and climate change made existing problems worse.
“With the right policy settings and with some relatively simple changes to our ETS we could become fully greenhouse gas neutral if we chose to. That we choose instead to do less than our share to solve the problem is shameful.”
Professor Euan Mason
University of Canterbury
For NZ, key problems included loss of ecosystem biodiversity, especially marine and alpine ecosystems, and flooding and coastal inundation risks.
The report said there had been a “significant adaptation deficit” in many places, meaning the country had done little so far to prepare.
“This new report is a wake-up call,” Renwick said. “We must adapt to changes that are already under way and it is critical to develop serious mitigation measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst of what the future has to hold.”
Peter Barrett, Emeritus Professor of Geology at Victoria University, said the new report focused of the risk of climate change for natural and human systems.
He was keenly aware of that as a scientist who had worked in Antarctica for the past four decades.
The ice sheet on that remote continent began to melt in the 1990s and the rate was accelerating, he said.
“The basic science behind climate change was established over a century ago and five comprehensive reports from the IPCC have been released over the last two decades with increasing evidence and confidence in the primary driver behind it – greenhouse gas emissions.
“Yet we allow these to continue to rise. Why?”
In a communication-rich world it could not be for the lack of knowledge, Barrett said.
There were plainly challenges in expressing the extent and complexity of climate change consequences in ways that could be widely understood by policy makers and the public, he said.
All scientists had been concerned at recent attacks on the credibility of climate scientists and their work.
“When the issue is about risk, then credibility is paramount. As leading economist Lord Stern reminded us last month: ‘Delay is dangerous. Inaction could be justified only if we could have great confidence that the risks posed by climate change are small. But that is not what 200 years of climate science is telling us. The risks are huge,’”
- The NZ lead authors of the IPCC’s Australasia chapter were NIWA climate scientist Dr Andrew Tait, AgResearch scientist Dr Paul Newton and NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre scientist Dr Andy Reisinger.
