Clean and Green Aotearoa New Zealand?

When you picture New Zealand, the odds are good that you picture an untouched waterfall, straight out of Lord of the Rings. I have camped at the base of the waterfall you’re probably thinking of.

That’s not a real picture of New Zealand. Native bush and national parks make up a small part of the country – and the government has hinted at mining within our national parks. Over a third of the country’s population lives in Auckland, a suburban sprawl with about half the public transport of a small European town.

New Zealand’s environmental policy is a contradiction, and its international stance is the same. The government recognises a “clean and green” brand as the core of our tourism – but much of our GDP comes from intensive dairy farming, which infects our rivers with runoff and accounts for around half the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Generally, New Zealand professes to take a “centrist” and “cooperative” stance in negotiations. Underlying this, however, is a very self-interested negotiating strategy.

In the Kyoto Protocol track, New Zealand stresses transparency and balance. As a member of the Umbrella Group, a loose affiliation that aims to promote cost effectiveness and flexibility within the Kyoto Protocol system, New Zealand is willing to consider a second Kyoto commitment period subject to several conditions.

New Zealand seeks a successor agreement by 2020. It hopes to negotiate a mandate to agree, either at Durban or more probably a subsequent COP.

In climate financing, New Zealand stresses the importance of governments leveraging private finance to secure or exceed the US$100 billion 2020 target.

Agriculture and forestry are both crucial issues for New Zealand.

When it comes to practically implementing technology transfer and providing adaptation and mitigating funding, New Zealand focuses on the Pacific. Unusually, some 70% of funding provided by New Zealand each year is used for adaptation projects, with the balance devoted to mitigation. For more states, the opposite is the case.

Overall, New Zealand presents two quite different faces in the negotiations. Unlike other States in the Umbrella Group, which overtly attack the core of the Kyoto Protocol and openly assert a “hard-ball” strategy with developing States, New Zealand plays a subtle game. It takes contradictory positions and stalls talks, but maintains a commitment to the outcome it jeopardises.

It’s going to be an interesting ten days. Our delegation, the New Zealand Youth Delegation, meets the negotiators daily. We can sometimes ask to meet a specialist in a certain topic, but we never know which of the negotiating team we’ll get to talk to. Three of us will be blogging here on Adopt a Negotiator: Jonathan Williams, Rachel Dobric, and me. All our posts will be in the New Zealand category.