New Climate Case Challenges New Zealand’s Emissions Reduction Plan, Reliance On Forestry Offsets

The New Zealand government is facing a lawsuit challenging its plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, claiming the plan does not meet requirements under the country’s framework climate law and that it relies too heavily on speculative forestry offsets while failing to tackle emissions at their source. According to Lawyers for Climate Action NZ, one of the groups behind the new case, it is the first lawsuit in the world to challenge a government’s overreliance on tree planting to reduce emissions. The group also says it is the first case in New Zealand challenging an emissions reduction plan under the country’s Climate Change Response Act of 2002.

Under that law, which was amended in 2019, the government must establish emissions reduction plans every five years that set out measures for meeting specified reduction targets, on a pathway to reaching net zero emissions by 2050. After a right-wing coalition government took office in late 2023, it cancelled 35 programs and policies that were part of the first emissions reduction plan. And it did so without public consultation, contrary to requirements under the statute, the climate lawyers argue.

The government then issued a second emissions reduction plan last December that takes a risky approach to reductions including through reliance on heavy tree planting, according to the plaintiffs.

“We’re filing this case because it’s critical our government is held to account. The world’s leading scientists have made clear that this is the critical decade for climate action - but the NZ government has been quietly cutting climate policies, and relying on planting pine trees as an alternative,” Lawyers for Climate Action NZ said in a statement.

The group filed the case along with Environmental Law Initiative in the High Court of Wellington on June 10. New Zealand’s climate change minister is the listed defendant. The minister’s office is declining to comment on matters before the courts, according to the Guardian, which first reported on the legal action.

The groups filing the claim say that the government’s second emissions reduction plan fails to ensure that emissions will meet established targets and assumes that reductions will occur without specific strategies.

“The government’s plan does not give confidence; in our view, it is neither credible or capable of achieving the purpose, which is to reduce emissions,” Environmental Law Initiative’s Matt Hall said. He argued the minister appeared to ignore warnings from New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission that forestry offsets should not replace emissions reductions at their source.

“The science is clear that forestry is important, but it’s not a substitute for reducing our combustion of fossil fuels,” Hall said.

This is not the first time that Lawyers for Climate Action New Zealand have brought a judicial review action against the government. In 2021 the group sued the Climate Change Minister and the Climate Change Commission, challenging the Commission’s advice and methodologies informing the minister’s emissions budgets. The lower court ultimate rejected the claims, and in March that decision was affirmed on appeal. On April 30, Lawyers for Climate Action NZ announced it would lodge a final appeal to the country’s Supreme Court.