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Some Auckland councillors fear Auckland’s target of halving emissions by 2030 is unobtainable.
At the Planning, Environment and Parks Committee on September 7, councillors received its annual update on Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri, Auckland’s climate plan.
The plan, which was adopted in 2019, is sitting with just three per cent of the actions completed, 31 per cent on track, 52 per cent started but requiring more work, and 13 per cent not in progress.
Acting chief sustainability officer Lauren Simpson said there had been a modest improvement in progress on the plan.
“If we combine the actions on track and underway that gives us 86 per cent for this reporting year versus 85 per cent for the previous year,” Simpson said.
Currently, only the 2019 data on Auckland’s emissions is available, leaving everyone in the dark on the city’s actual emissions output.
Councillors said the emissions graph of council’s present position, and where it needed to be, was starting to look like a cliff edge.
Simpson said there would be improvements in the lag time for emissions data with the 2020 and 2021 data sets expected to be available later this year.
Speaking to the graph, she said the steeper the curve got, the more disruptive and costly change would be.
Cr Maurice Williamson said after running the numbers through some algorithms he found the chance of hitting the target of 50 per cent emissions reduction was less than 0.1 of one per cent.
“When will we make a decision that we cannot make that target and that a new one should be set, because quite frankly your chances of hitting the current target, even with quite catastrophic changes, are very, very low,” Williamson said.
Chief of strategy Megan Tyler said it was up to councillors and the mayor to decide if the target needed to change.
“You are right though. Every year that we don’t make some big changes as a region it gets harder and harder,” Tyler said.
She said the Auckland target was in keeping with national and international emissions reduction targets.
Cr Shane Henderson said it was not fair to assume that emissions in Auckland were going up.
“I think the data needs to come in before we can make an assumption like that, especially when you consider 2020 when half of us were working from home anyway,” Henderson.
“We have got to recommit to things like the Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway where we are putting more people into mass rapid transit, which has huge positive climate implications.”
He said keeping emissions reduction front-of-mind in decision-making was an important step to “meet the targets that we promised Aucklanders”.
Chair Richard Hills said it sounded like some councillors were not game to take on the target but that he was not keen to change it.
“The targets are based on what the rest of the world is supposed to be aiming for. Yes, it does look like a cliff but that is the reality – there is a lot of good happening and we just need to ramp that up.”
