The Government is looking into the possibility of a public sector carbon offsetting scheme to help agencies reach carbon neutrality, Marc Daalder reports
Government agencies are already expressing concerns about the potential costs of carbon offsets they'll have to purchase in 2025.
Under the Carbon Neutral Government Programme (CNGP), launched in 2020 when the Government declared a climate emergency, the public sector will have to reach net zero emissions by 2025. In the first instance, that will entail reducing emissions by, for example, swapping out petrol cars for electric vehicles or replacing coal boilers with electric solutions. Any emissions that remain in 2025 will have to be offset.
Officials are still nutting out exactly how offsetting will work. One of the options raised in a briefing released to Newsroom under the Official Information Act is a "whole-of-government portfolio approach". Essentially, a public sector-run offset market using Crown resources could reduce costs for agencies and "drive development of further science and research to enable improvement and expansion of [carbon] accounting coverage such as wetlands and blue carbon", Climate Change Minister James Shaw wrote in feedback on the plan.
"Crown offsets could use Crown land and would reduce risks associated with an all of government approach - ie cost effectiveness, limiting choice and innovation," officials commented. "Work to consider offsetting will include consideration of governance and operational delivery, including Te Uru Rākau [the Forestry Service]."
Shaw told Newsroom that no final decisions had yet been made, but said the public sector offset portfolio remained one of the options under consideration.
"It's an option. But the thing is, we're still in the reasonably early stages of policy developments and we're quite a long way from making Cabinet decisions or anything like that," he said.
The scheme could involve agencies paying for trees to be planted on Crown land and using the resulting carbon sequestration to offset their emissions.
"We want to make sure that when offsetting comes in, it's a last resort rather than a first resort. Agencies should really demonstrate that they have done absolutely everything that they can to reduce emissions before offsetting what remains," Shaw said.
Another briefing obtained under the Official Information Act reveals agencies have already said they're worried about the cost of offsetting. The briefing included an initial estimate of the total cost of offsetting, but this was redacted.
"Agencies are concerned what impact this will have on their service delivery, should it be covered within baselines," officials from the Ministry for the Environment reported. In response to that, Shaw wrote, "Every business has concerns when addressing climate change". The corresponding Cabinet paper was then "updated to show concerns are not limited solely to government agencies and that the CNGP is about leading by example".
Speaking to Newsroom, Shaw reiterated that perspective.
"I would just say that, if agencies are concerned about the cost of offsetting, then they should think about what emissions they can reduce. In most cases, the things you can do to reduce emissions have considerable financial benefits for the agency."
However, he was sympathetic to particularly complex sources of emissions which couldn't be eliminated by 2025 and the general difficulty of getting government to fully decarbonise.
"It's a lot easier to swap out a coal boiler in a small rural school than it is in a major, metropolitan hospital and so some of those really big ticket items, like those multi-megawatt furnaces that we've got in some of our really big institutions, they won't be gone by 2025," he said. "Getting the enormous beast that is government and all of its different agencies to gear up to do emissions reductions programmes takes quite a lot of effort."
Shaw had told Newsroom in 2021 that public sector "inertia" was to blame for delays in electrifying the government fleet.
However, the issue comes down to a matter of principle in the end, he said on Wednesday.
"We're asking pretty much every business to do this. Every organisation in the country that's trying to decarbonise will be going through exactly the same sets of challenges," he said.
"I think it's entirely reasonable that the public sector goes through that same set of challenges as we're asking of everybody else in the country."
