Controlling climate change: Who is to account? Why? And how?

Authors: Stan Godlovitch
Publication: New Zealand Journal of Forestry, Volume N.Z.J.For. 2006, Issue N.Z.J.For. 51(4) 2007, pp 13-20, Jan 2007
Publisher: New Zealand Institute of Forestry

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Abstract: Some thoughts about MAF’s Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change: Options for a Plan of Action (Wellington, 2006)Preamble
The government of New Zealand has decided that it must adopt a national stance to address problems created by concerns about global climate change brought on by rising accumulations of greenhouse gasses. This has further prompted the development of a series of policies to detail responses to those varied aspects of New Zealand life expected to be affected. What has brought on this concern about climate change? What kinds of response are being mooted? What sorts of effects will such responses bring?

In response to mounting acknowledgement of worrisome climate change, the unwitting role humans have played in it, and the call to do something about it internationally, the United Nations adopted its Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. Following this, the Kyoto Protocol was agreed to by 180 countries in 1997. New Zealand became a signatory in 1998 (United Nations 1998). This Protocol sets down measurable emissions targets designed to ensure that human contributions to greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere do not further exacerbate the climate change such gasses affect. In particular, the accepted level set by the signatories was their individual 1990 greenhouse gas emission levels. They were all meant to have achieved this level by 2000, but did not. New targets were set to be achieved during the so-called first Kyoto Commitment Period which runs from 2008 - 2012.

Not only has New Zealand already assumed international commitments under the Kyoto Protocol; it appears to have taken to heart concerns of both an ethical and pragmatic nature. These latter take in perceived environmental obligations as such at a national level, as well as the need to have an appropriate and timely response to predicted threats to New Zealand’s own environmental integrity with its consequent projected effects upon the country’s social and economic stability.

Regarding both the ethical and pragmatic considerations, the notion of sustainability is everywhere afoot, this popular concept having assumed colossal influence as a prime index and indicator of fitting policy directions. Sustainability has come to do double duty in its station as benchmark, serving ethically as a generic environmental virtue adherence to which serves as a reliable indication of generic environmental responsibility (if not also sincerity); but also pragmatically as an umbrella directive for realistically reliable and politically salable economic practices which, to reckon on and factor in environmental cost as it may adversely affect their own self-interests - not to mention the welfare of economically innocent third-parties.

As if never to say ‘Die’ by playing an entirely defensive, regressive and self-protective hand, there are added optimistic speculations as to how New Zealand may even benefit - that is, positively grow in quite new business and research capacities - by seeking advantage in new markets created as a result of growing worries internationally about impending climate change. 

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