Bold action and solutions that hold polluters to account
The Green Party will drive meaningful action, cutting climate pollution and making big polluters pay.
We will ensure that polluting corporations pay for Aotearoa to electrify our economy. By rapidly phasing out fossil fuels, we can ease cost of living pressures and decrease our vulnerability to global price shocks.
Under the leadership of a Green Minister for Climate Change, emissions began to drop. But now, the current Government is deliberately making choices to take us off that track. In Aotearoa, progress towards our domestic climate targets is at risk. Our international reputation has been tarnished due to this Government’s decisions to weaken our climate targets and exempt our biggest polluters from paying for their greenhouse gas emissions, undermining international agreements we have signed up to.
Decades of climate inaction shows that a hands-off government will fail to decarbonise our economy and secure the future everyone deserves. The market will not respond to the climate crisis at the scale or pace we need, and won’t give fair outcomes for those most affected.
We need political leadership that stops emissions at source, makes polluters pay, and focuses all government institutions on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.
The Green Party will implement climate solutions that tackle the root causes and honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We will remove economic incentives that encourage and enable climate pollution.
Our plan
- Strengthen the Zero Carbon Act by requiring the government Budget process to be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, gross emissions reduction targets and international commitments.
- Empower the Climate Change Commission to directly set unit supply in the Emissions Trading Scheme, in line with emissions budgets. Align the government Budget process with the National Adaptation Plan and Emissions Reduction Plans.
- Introduce a price on agricultural emissions to ensure methane reduction targets are met, with financial and technical support for on-farm emissions reduction.
- Reform the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to restore credibility to the market by phasing out the free allocation of units, removing forestry offsetting so the system functions as a genuine ‘cap-and-trade’ system, and redirecting funding from the reformed ETS to an improved Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund.
- Ensure Aotearoa meets our Paris Agreement commitments through strong domestic action and, if necessary, environmentally and socially responsible initiatives overseas.
- Improve public transparency on the costs of inaction by including the fiscal impact of the Nationally Determined Contribution obligation in the financial statements.