NZ's Next NDC: Complying with Paris Agreement in setting NDC2

Together with the Environmental Defence Society, WWF New Zealand, and Greenpeace Aotearoa, we have written a submission to the Ministry for the Environment on New Zealand’s next Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, which we are due to set in February 2025.

You can read our submission here:

NDCs are the climate action plans and targets that all countries part of the Paris Agreement must make every five years, designed to progressively ratchet up ambition on mitigation.

Our key points are:

• The government cannot prioritise or deprioritise the core legal requirements under the Paris Agreement (as question 2 of the discussion document suggests).

• It's critical, both for the climate and our reputation as a country, that the next NDC is set with integrity, without creative accounting, and prioritises gross emissions reductions (rather than the current "gross:net" approach)

• New Zealand also needs to make sure that it does its fair share of the global effort - as required by the Paris Agreement. We have the same GDP per capita as the European Union, but our gross emissions-per-GDP ratio is the third highest of all advanced economies. The Climate Change Commission has laid out achievable pathways for meaningful emissions reductions - and embracing a low-emissions economy has economic upsides, too!