New Zealand boasts ambitious climate change policy

Sep 20, 2007, 8:01 GMT

Wellington - The New Zealand government announced Thursday a new seven-year policy designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and preserve the country's clean and green environment which it promotes to attract tourists and market its food exports around the world.

Energy and Climate Change Minister David Parker said the policy would be talked about around the world, because New Zealand was seen as an environmental leader.

'The world will take hope from the fact that we can do it. And if we can, so can the world,' he said

Prime Minister Helen Clark said climate change was one of the most important global issues facing the country and it was essential to encourage businesses and households to reduce pollution and become more energy efficient.

The policy includes an emissions-trading scheme which will put a price on greenhouse gas pollution across the entire economy in stages. There are also measures to encourage planting more trees which soak up carbon and a target to make 90 per cent of total power generation from renewable sources by 2025.

It commits New Zealand to become one of the first nations to use electric vehicles widely and to cut emissions from the transport sector in half by 2040.

Forestry will be the first sector to come under the emissions trading scheme from next January, with forest owners able to gain carbon credits for newly planted trees and incentives designed to increase the country's forested area by 250,000 hectares by 2020.

The transport sector will be included in 2009, inevitably increasing petrol prices, with electricity generation and other industries coming into the scheme the following year.

About half of all New Zealand's greenhouse gases come from belching cattle and sheep on 40,000 farms. Recognizing that technology to deal with livestock methane emissions is still being developed, agriculture is excluded until 2013.

Parker said latest estimates showed that New Zealand was likely to exceed the commitment it made under the Kyoto protocol on climate change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 45.5 million tonnes by 2012.

The new policies would reduce that deficit to at least 25 million tonnes, he said.