Climate First Policies

All Climate First policies reflect the need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand. Thus our policies are derived from the RERP (the Required Emission Reduction Pathway) of reducing 2.75 Mtns year on year until 2038, shared among the 5 economic sectors of Agriculture, Energy, Transport, Industrial Processes and Waste, in proportion to their current emissions. For example Agriculture with 47% of emissions must make 47% of the reductions..

Note on policies

Climate First has been developing policies over the last four years, and, because many of our policies are heavily reliant on analysing emissions statistics, changing greenhouse gas measurements in the NZ Inventory can render our calculations out of date. Several of our major policy essays are based on the 2013 inventory and projections from the second biennial report. The most important change has been in the 2015 inventory, which lowered values for the whole 1990-2015 time series by about 2 Mtns below the 2014 figures. However as both the base 1990 figure and the current 2015 figures have been reduced, our conclusions remain valid. Because Climate First's policies are based on clear principles, small changes in actual values do not change our fundamental recommendations.