 I don't want to welcome everybody to this panel discussion, and I emphasise the panel because I'd like the aim of the exercise is to have a discussion around carbon legislation that is being proposed by the Government. I would prefer that people did not. I guess it's finding out the ins and outs of what's being proposed rather than people making statements about whether they believe in climate change or not, so that's basically off the table. It's my great pleasure to introduce the panel to you. Our first speaker is John Morrow, who's the Chief Sustainability Officer with Auckland Council, and then he'll be followed by Dr Amelia Sharman, who is with the Interim Climate Change Committee. She's on secondment from the Productivity Commission, and then John Kinnege will follow Amelia, and John is the Executive Director of Business NZ Energy Council, and I should just like to acknowledge the support that the NZ Business Energy Council has afforded the Energy Centre to do the modelling work looking at New Zealand's energy futures. So that's a very exciting project that we have with the New Zealand Energy Council. And then the last speaker is Professor Caroline Saunders, who is incredibly well known as an academic in New Zealand. Caroline is based at Lincoln University, and I understand she's just launched a book on wellbeing. Is that right, Caroline? And she's probably got flyers there. It's free, so there you go. The price is right. Okay, so as you know, as I understand it, the zero-carbon bill is currently being drafted, and my understanding is that was to occur, or is to occur over July, December of this year, and it'll go to select committee at the beginning of the new year. So with that in mind, I'd just like to ask John to lead off the presentation, and we're going to ask each speaker to speak for 10 minutes, and then at the end, after Caroline, we'll have a question and answer session. So John, welcome. Tena koutou katoa ko John Moro tako angola. No America Aho ke Ponsonby e Noho ana ko Toko Toranga hei chief sustainability officer te Kaunihera o Tama'ki Makaurau Aho no Reira tena koutou katoa. Thank you for the opportunity to be up here. My name is John Moro, as you were told, and I've got 10 minutes to whip you through the clickers there. A quick presentation about three things. That's the end. That's pretty quick. Any questions? So I'm clearly, I just wanted to, there we go, excellent. Hey, great. Look, pretty pictures. Here we go. So three quick things. One, a few basics about the zero carbon bill, which we can probably cover off in two slides, and I'm guessing this is a relatively informed audience. The second thing is just, you know, of course, I'm from council. I want to tell you all the great stuff we're doing, but I do have a confession in there too, as I've said to a few over one. And then also what we're really up against and how we really need to reposition ourselves to think about the future. So those are the three things I'll cover now about eight and a half minutes. But let's be really clear. How many people besides Russell Bailey came here to see this guy instead of me? I'm really sorry. And I can't speak on behalf of the Green Party, but I can actually say from a council who's quite involved with central government and actually working and have a signed agreement with how we're working together on climate change, talk a little bit about what we're doing in this space and a little bit about government, obviously not from somebody from central government. This is what I presented to councillors and the mayor when we tried to get our zero carbon bill submission across the line, which was successfully voted for. And I'll show you what our actual position is in the next slide. But for those who are coming up to speed on what the zero carbon bill is, which I imagine is probably no one, you know, really what this does is set the policy architecture for the future. It's not a quick fix. It's actually what can we do now to transition to a low carbon and resilient society over the course of several decades? That's what this is about. It provides stability and transparency across all sectors. And it actually does quite a bit to try to generate pathways for innovation so that we don't leave businesses or people behind. The specifics, as those who are well read in the, this is almost painful to see me condense it to just a few words, but it sets targets and budgets that align with those targets. It creates a new independent commission, which I believe my colleague might speak a little bit about. And then it considers climate change adaptation as part of the package, which is actually later at minute nine, one of my takeaway messages from what we're doing. These are the six key points we made to committee and they bought it and they endorsed it. And that's what we sent off to the ministry for the environment. I won't go into every detail here, but I have a suspicion we might get talking about what it means to set a target of net zero across all gases. That could be a feisty one because it's contestable. The rest of it isn't terribly contestable, but maybe it is from the audience so we can go there. The other thing I wanted to do is just take you very briefly through some of the things we're doing as council, but of course I'm going to end with a bit of a confession. And I'm going to give you five quick examples of an obvious problem that has something to do with climate change and then a bit of value add, something that we've done a slight bit differently to get a better outcome. The first one is actually in our waste and to acknowledge the folks in the waste team and actually to acknowledge the staff here from Auckland Council. I've seen Sophie Heyway, I think Alec Tang from my team might be here, and maybe Sarah Anderson. There's some great people at council doing innovative work in the space of waste and actually a lot of other things. And instead of saying how do we just get the waste done, we actually created community recycling centers that empower the community, almost decentralised power to individuals creating jobs and actually diverting something like 62% of waste to landfill at some of these centers. So it's a bit of a new way of doing business in the waste space. You can look at flooding and infrastructure as an issue and say, well, let's just put in a bigger pipe when we've got a problem with flooding. Instead, the Healthy Waters team went in and actually created training for the workforce there, a collaborative tree planting nursery with a school and a local trust, and actually added transport choice to the mix, actually did what the community wanted in that space. And instead of it being a how to keep flooding at Bay project, it became a project people are increasingly excited about. The other problem around car dependence, you know, wow, we have a problem with choice, I'd still say, and a problem with safety, which has been hitting the newspapers lately. Well, what can we do to add value here? We could actually invest. We could invest $200 million in cycle ways over the course of the last three years with some central government funding. There's my pitch for Gareth in government, and it's about placemaking and creating choice that we currently don't have. I mean, I rode my bike here and had to look over my shoulder at every corner. So this is a very real thing for Auckland right now. Same thing with the city being dead by 501. You know, that's when I first came to New Zealand about 20 years ago, not to live here, but to travel. I noticed that the city sort of died a very quick death after the workday. Instead, now you're seeing increasingly a city that's built for families, a city that's built for fun, and that's actually facilitating activation of space like here in Silo Park. And then the last example I'll give you is around funding. And we were talking a bit about this earlier. You know, how do you align the funding streams to what outcomes you actually want out of that funding? We've done that recently with targeted rates, which thank you for those who are paying targeted rates to Auckland Council to actually deliver outcomes like water quality. We've also done this with the issue of New Zealand's first green bond on the domestic market. $200 million that's financing and refinancing our electric train fleet. And that's a bit of a first kind of pushing out the boat a little bit to say, look, the investment community is looking for a different set of outcomes around wellbeing. And this is one of those tools that we've used to get there. OK, so I've given you my five examples. My confession, we are not doing enough and we are not doing it fast enough, full stop. So what's at stake? Obviously, we've got issues like, ooh, I have animations that I didn't know about. Issues like rising emissions. Here's the reality, our emissions continue to tick upward. Per capita, they're starting to decouple. They still go upward over time when our stated goal is to come down. Now, we've got GDP growth, we've got population growth, but other cities are cracking that and delivering zero, well, more low carbon solutions with rising populations in GDP, so we can too. We're also seeing tremendous risks of climate impacts and actually seeing them today in Auckland. And I'll get into that in a second. So in the emissions side, for those who need to kind of primer on what our emissions sources are, really it's transport and industry in Auckland. It's not agriculture like is the case for the national conversation, which makes us a bit different as the largest local authority or regional authority. And then the impact side, you'll see that, you know, no surprises here. Sea is going to go up, it's going to get hotter, rain is going to get more intense and drought conditions and too wet will actually happen at the same time. We're getting smarter about where this is going to happen and what it looks like between now and 2110. We've done that work and so we could actually inform better decisions around infrastructure and policy making. You probably can't read this one, it's all right, but there are some real issues that will actually result in some of these changes to the climate here regionally in Auckland and of course there would be some site-specific issues too. Everything from issues around coastal erosion to invasive species to reduced infrastructure resilience. So this is a real thing. We look forward to the Auckland of not just 30 years from now, but actually the Auckland of three years from now and how many, you know, 500-year floods are we going to feel in the next five years? It's a really serious issue for us now. So I think I'm just about there. Solutions and what's at stake and how are we going to move forward, really not to be too alliterative here, but we need to integrate and innovate. There's a reason why there's this kind of cheesy Venn diagram about how you do adaptation and mitigation at the same time because you deliver a whole suite of benefits if you do that. And taking away reducing emissions and actually becoming climate resilient, if we're really speaking to those maybe outside this room and those who really need to care about this issue, we're talking about human health, we're talking about social cohesion, we're talking about long-term economic productivity. Those are the things that a real strong push toward climate action will actually get us in the long-term future. The other things, of course, we need to involve, we're council, we want to hear from you and we want to work with you to evolve our plan. And we need to invest, like I said in the Green Bond issue, we actually need to invest in these solutions to actually make it move forward. So here's where I do my shameless pitch. I might get another chance to do it when I'm on the panel, but it's small potatoes because we've got lots of work streams right now of developing our climate action plan. But one of those things you could actually log on as you're in this room, if you so choose, is to climateAKL.NZ. It's a crowdsourced ideas platform that we've just ginned up that says, right, what are your solutions for how to become climate resilient and low-carbon? The best ideas will be fed into an expert panel, the best ideas will be iterated over time, and we'll actually feed them into our climate plan so you can be involved right now from your seat, if you so choose. I think, oh, and of course, all sorts of other engagement including youth events that we've been doing around this work. I think we've had four separate youth events just in the last couple months in this space and a whole host of other activity. Is David Hall here as well? I think he was on the RSVP list. I don't think he's here. He's a member of our independent advisory group that we have from kind of our mini climate commission. So there's a whole range of things we're doing right now to develop our plan for Auckland, but I think that's all the time I have. Thank you very much. Hi, my name is Amelia. I'm currently at the Interim Climate Change Committee, which I'm not going to talk about in my presentation, but you can ask me questions about in the panel. I am going to talk about the NZ transition to a low emissions economy. So for those who don't know what the Productivity Commission is, we're an independent Crown entity. We have three commissioners and staff of about 20 people, 15, 20 people, and we get given terms of reference by the Government on thorny public policy issues that we want us to look at really and have a really good look at. We do a lot of work on housing. We did some tertiary education, which might be of interest to people in this room, and then we got given the low emissions economy inquiry by the previous Government. So what happens in an inquiry? So we get given the terms of reference by the Government. We take about six weeks to write an issues paper and we put out loads and loads of questions and we want submissions from you on the answers to those questions. So in this inquiry we got more submissions than we have ever had ever. One of our other enquiries got 12, so over 400 was huge for us. And then what we do is we go away, produce a draft report which has answers to most of our questions but still some questions and then a final report. This inquiry was the first time we'd had a big change of Government. The new Government said, hey, keep going but think about not just a low emissions economy in New Zealand. So I'll explain how we did that in the future or later on. So we had lots of submissions. We attended lots of events. We were really interested in the UK climate change Acts. We went over there and wrote a note about how that works. We had loads and loads of engagement meetings. We did a couple of bits of expert modelling. So one was on the electricity sector. The electricity sector is absolutely central to the transition. And then we also did some wider modelling, which incorporated land use and energy and this idea of uncertainty. What do you do in the future when the future is uncertain? So I'll talk about that as well. And then, as I said, find a report in August. It is, I'm sorry, over 600 pages. You don't have to read all of that. There's a two-minute video, which you can want. There's also every chapter, there's 17 chapters. Every chapter has a one-page summary so you can read the whole report in 17 pages. So to achieve a low emissions economy, we need stable, incredible climate policy. This is, sounds a bit banal, but it is absolutely vital. You need to set in place policy that endures over time that people believe is going to last, that they can make good investment decisions. And this is individuals making good investment decisions, business making good investment decisions and, you know, your wider civil society. So what does this mean, really, in practice? So there's four pillars that we identified under stable, incredible climate policy. Firstly, we need to do better emissions pricing. We need to reform the ETS as it currently stands. So it's a cap-and-trade scheme with no cap. So we recommended that there absolutely needs to be a cap. We also recommended a separate emissions pricing scheme for biogenic methane. So that's methane from waste and from agriculture. We proposed that that could either take the form of a dual-cap New Zealand emissions trading scheme or a methane quota system. So really similar to the fisheries individual transferable quota system. And I'm really happy to take questions on that. Second, legislation institutions. We need new law. So fantastic. Is there a carbon bill? Exactly what we recommended. So that is, as John said, a series of emissions budgets that over time get you to your goal. That you have really strong capability within central government to make good plans. And then also you have an independent climate change commission who can recommend but not decide on the emissions budgets and what, you know, some of the work should be done. Complementary regulations and policies. Pricing is really important. It sends a really strong signal, but it's not going to get you all the way. There are lots of places across the economy where emissions pricing is not going to be the answer. So we recommend all sorts of things that need to happen across the economy at the emissions price. You might have heard of our recommendation for a fee bait. So that's for electric vehicles. So when you're importing electric vehicles, if you're importing vehicles over a certain emission standards, you pay a fee. If you import them under a certain emission standard, you get a rebate. It's physically neutral. It is regressive, however. So therefore we also recommend a scrappage policy for those on low incomes to help them move towards electric vehicles. Because, as John pointed out, there are big problems and we really need to ramp up the uptake of EVs. And then we've got lots and lots of other complementary policies and waste in other sectors. And then finally, investment and innovation. Innovation is vital. If we don't have innovation, the whole thing is not going to work. The whole point of emissions pricing is that innovation eventually takes over. It forces people to do the exciting work that means you don't need to pay an emissions price. Investment, capital out there to achieve a low emissions future. It's just about redirecting that investment into low emitting activities versus high emitting activities. We recommend lots of things around investment, one of which is mandatory climate related disclosures for large organisations. So you are having to talk about what it is in your organisation, what the risk is to your business. That's really important for two reasons. A, it helps investors decide across comparable opportunities which is the low emissions option so they can reduce their risk. And also it helps the business themselves look internally and say, hey, how can we be more resilient? How can we manage our climate risk? The zero carbon bill, as I said, we recommended this first. Not our idea really. The emissions budgets absolutely central. I don't think people really realise how much of a core economic policy emissions budgets are. But if you have a target and your emissions budgets are set to that target, it really is going to drive a lot of investment. As I said, I'm on the interim committee. I'm not working on the zero carbon bill. We're trying to have a firewall between us. But if people have questions, I can hopefully tell you what I know about what's going on there. Short and long lived gas is one of my favourite subjects. New Zealand is really, really unusual and I don't think some people realise how unusual we are. We've had a lot of people who have developed economies have, most of their emissions are CO2, which is long lived. There is no debate. There's no question that CO2 needs to get to net zero or negative to stop warming. It just absolutely has to. That any additional CO2 going into the atmosphere is going to contribute to warming. However, short lived gases and that's mostly biogenic methane, but at some HFCs they don't have to get to net zero to stop warming. This is because the short lived gas basically the steady state if you think about the BAFTA being two degrees and you don't want the level of the water to overflow, you've got to stop your long lived gas inflow but you can have a steady inflow and outflow of short lived gases. This does not mean that the current level of short lived gases is sustainable. There has to be substantial and sustained emissions reductions of short lived gases but the key message we really we found throughout the inquiry they do not need to get to net zero to stop warming and that is the key goal. So we recommend separate targets for long and short lived gases in the zero carbon bill where there is a net zero target by a specified date say 2050 whereas your short lived gas target is recommended on advice of the climate change commission and then that is set in delegated legislation because the key thing there is that target level is likely to change over time. We don't know now in 2018 what the right sustained level of methane is going to be to stop to limit warming to two degrees so we need some kind of flexibility in the system to allow for that. So as I said we did modelling we did modelling to net zero we did modelling to 25 megatons so a low emissions future. We also did some really interesting modelling around uncertainty so most modelling is what's called scientific foresight modelling you know what's going to happen out to the future we don't know what's going to happen out to the future with technology so what we did was we did some really cool nifty stuff with Motu concept and vivid our modelers and what we found was that in any state of the world no matter what technology comes along we will be better off in a future where there are higher emissions prices early. So by early I mean up until 2030 so if we have stricter emissions budgets which inevitably lead to higher emissions prices in the early stages the overall transition to net zero is going to be less costly. The reasons why that is is because it helps to avoid lock-in of high emitting assets you know decisions that are being made now about things like boilers and whatnot and then also it spurs innovation as I said before innovation is critical we absolutely need technology to help us with this challenge so the more that we can spur that on the better and the modelling showed us that there are some key changes that need to occur we need to replace fossil fuels and we need to replace them with electricity, low emissions electricity across the economy that's things like EVs that's in process heat it's really is about saying we've got to stop burning fossil fuels and how can we make that happen and then secondly we've got to change land use and there's two aspects to that firstly the modelling showed us and this is just modelling I want to caveat that the lowest cost way to achieve most of our emissions reductions targets is afforestation so planting lots and lots and lots of trees that our modelling showed us 1.8 to 2.3 million hectares of trees to put that in context a billion trees is only half a million hectares so in this modelling it showed things like 20% of gizbin would be afforested if that is actually going to happen we need to really seriously consider if that's the right future for New Zealand but that's what the modelling at the moment is telling us is the lowest cost way to achieve our targets and interestingly that is mostly from marginal sheep and beef land it's not from dairy it's from land that is currently marginally profitable in its current form and secondly we need to change the structure and methods of agricultural production we need to be much better at taking up agricultural innovation and that's it please go and watch the video read the report and ask me any questions Good evening everybody I'm John Carnegie I'm the Executive Director of the Business New Zealand Energy Council and I'm Head of Climate Change Policy at Business New Zealand which is New Zealand's peak business advocacy organisation actually I'm going to take a slightly different view and actually dovetails quite nicely with what we've already heard in terms of rather than speaking about specific solutions which of course there are numerous I'm going to talk a bit more about how business in general thinks about zero carbon bill and how we should approach things and then we'll have, we can have a richer conversation hopefully after that now John started with a confession actually I have I have an admission and so I thought straight off the bat I'd start with an admission of sorts and that's that I don't know the future now actually it's amazing the number of people actually that do or at least admit to doing so I'm sorry to disappoint you now actually that might seem a bit trite in terms of the fact that actually none of us really do right and in fact with the rate of technological change that we're observing no one does though again you might be forgiven for thinking that some do because from our perspective actually the future has got if anything harder to predict not easier even if we think actually that the problem where solving has become clearer which of course in this case it absolutely has and this last bit is actually quite important I did say that the problem where solving that's climate change actually has got clearer and in fact more pressing so I hope you weren't expecting a business-type bloke to get up here and rail against climate change because that's not what I'm going to do but I guess the question that I'm posing is even if we know the direction we need to head in how do we know what New Zealand society and the economy might evolve to look like in 2050 and the Productivity Commission did some great work with respect to this but even beyond 2060, 2070 and how do we know what we do now will get us there in a way that can actually retain our high standards of living and actually that we have a prosperous thriving economy and as I said it's essentially we get smart people all the time actually consistently and organisations consistently failing to anticipate future trends and disruptions and it is because the future is unknowable even if the trends are clear enough but I guess my point is actually with care we can create our future but it's executing a course of action to a so-called endpoint that's fraught with difficulty because there are no easy or straightforward solutions to wicked and complex problems and in fact if anyone who has one of these are probably selling snake oil so why am I belaboring this point actually most certainly isn't a prescription for inaction it's just a plea for carefully considered policies and I guess the point is if we don't have these this is what we get and I hate to say there's actually a hell of a lot of this going around and this is what the Business New Zealand Energy Council and Business New Zealand in general are trying to avoid stories about the future that actually require massive leaps in faith about things that might happen so this is the sphere where we get stories around us all driving electric cars by 2020 and us solving our climate change challenge by a methane injection for cows or worse by our major energy intensive industry closing which I have to say was associated with some of the work that the Productivity Commission put out so in fact that might by its very nature tend us towards the conservative end of the spectrum but it's actually important to make sure that the stories that we're collectively telling are credible and plausible not incredible and implausible and so I guess actually here's another emission of sorts I absolutely hate this word and you actually often hear it bandied about as something that we need or in fact that business wants especially actually in the context of our emission reduction target certainty if only we have it it'll get us to where we need to get to right well actually in my book if someone's asking for certainty all it does is it implies that someone who wants someone wants someone who is less well placed to handle the risk to wear it and unfortunately in our context it's usually the government that ends up bearing the risk government full of very smart well meaning people but if anyone's going to lose their shirt they're going to lose their pass but so what business actually really wants and in fact we've already heard of this they want a policy and framework predictability and stability they want political durability so they want to know what the rules of the game are they don't want to be told how to play it basically because in telling someone telling business how to play the game actually what you're doing is hardwiring rather than into it and so what are we doing to help business and policy makers make good decisions about our future having just told you all that we don't know what the future is well what we're doing is we're leading across sector so that's public and private sector initiative to develop whole of energy sector scenarios and Basil kindly referred to that at the outset and so also we're collaborating as also mentioned by Basil with Auckland University and in fact the energy centre for which actually I'm incredibly thankful for the foresight of both Basil Sharpe and Goldborn, thank you Goldborn for their leadership and Kiti Sulamainan for who I see sitting in the back for her or let me call it a leap of courage or faith perhaps in committing to put in the hard yards on our ambitious little projects so thank you Kiti and here are the folk that are involved in the work that we're doing essentially say it's a who's who of the energy sector and we're incredibly proud of the work that we're doing and our refresh will see the light of day in the next six months sometime so in terms of climate change policy developments hopefully you'll know all of this I guess there's a lot going on actually that's a hell of an understatement what we actually have now is an incredibly crowded policy and institutional landscape so you know one of the key things actually I think going forward from a business perspective is how it all fits together so how do we transition smoothly to allow greenhouse gas economy and deliver economic growth there are some big questions actually as an economy and a society that we need to get our heads around and again one of the things that was mentioned earlier is often the aggressive nature of some of the changes the key thing that we learnt from the 80s is that the pace and distribution of transition is often uneven so we need to be incredibly cautious about that but whatever actually we do needs to work for New Zealand and our circumstances and again hopefully you'll know all of this right so here are some of these circumstances you know we are incredibly well placed as a country and a society you know especially actually when we look at some of the other countries who are trying to lift their renewable emission targets to say 15 or 20% and here again I mean it's just a nice picture of showing you the nature of the targets I possibly perhaps politely use the word ambitious you know because there are a number of options on the table I guess the key thing from our perspective is that and from a business perspective is actually the precise nature of the target matters a lot to business for business that's the beacon on the hill it'll be that that will help shape the investment intentions for the business community so you know you want to the key point there is about needing to calibrate policies and actions to achieve the target I mean and it's quite easy to roll off the tongue a net target well I actually have no idea what that is right I've no idea what the net bit of our target might be so they're actually you know again it's quite straightforward to say it'll be a net zero by a certain date but that actually might mean just planting a whole lot of trees right it's not really the transition that is a country we need maybe in the short term but certainly not in the long term actually what we need to do is be bending our gross curve downwards and we have to a very small extent started to do that I think over the last couple of years there's been a 2% reduction in gross emissions so you can just start to see the fresh shoots hopefully of a change in the nature of our economy I mean I guess the key thing from this for a business sector is that the business sector is actually an equal measure both excited by the opportunity but also feeling has a feeling of trepidation especially if you're in the emitting trade exposed sector so there's a need for a lot of conversations to continue over the next several months as I said not least of which will be around the nature of the targets so access to international units is one of the things that's been talked about linking to other schemes how to calibrate stringency of action across jurisdictions how to unlock finance and risk sharing tools now again incredibly easy to say but incredibly complex things to solve at an economy wide level so how to boost innovation all of the aforementioned relationship to our NDC as a as an economy wide target and also well we've got an ETS just what that means in terms of the range of other policies that we might want to implement both at the city level as well as nationally actually but though one of the things I do want to do is acknowledge the work of well actually I guess now he's not so freshly minted that was a bad pun party minister of climate change the Honourable James Shaw who has been working hellishly hard to build bridges to the business community and in fact to the agricultural sector and actually now importantly to the now opposition party in an effort to create a long term durable framework all I can say is that's in stark stark contrast to what's happening in other jurisdictions you just have to look across the ditch to get a sense of that right so where climate change policy in Australia is a bit of a blood sport right but it seems to be less so here thank goodness and so when you're talking about ambition actually this is where it ends up right so this is the carbon price and how it's tracked up to well actually it's hovering around the $25 fixed price option level the question of course is and again you know again if we think we all know the future the question is you know where will it go to next well you know imagine if I asked you all most of you would say it's going to go upright well you know it might but you know we've just seen quite a major correction on the carbon price in Europe so who knows what's going to happen to this price and that'll actually be a function of how stringent but the cap well where we've set with a cap sorry with a budget where we get to with a target and then how we set the budgets and then also actually whether we retain a price cap because of course we all know you can only control one thing quantity or price so if you have a price cap actually you may not get to an ambitious target but who knows so look in terms of business we see both risks and opportunities there's certainly more awareness of the window of opportunity now because it just makes good sense for business the New Zealand Inc brand and also you know business sees that the low carbon economy actually it doesn't just equal and in fact this is more widely acknowledged now in the public sector and the work that it's doing that it doesn't just acknowledge it doesn't just equate to the emissions trading scheme alone carbon pricing is an important part but it is just a part of the sustainable business story so the business challenge actually is adjusting to an increasingly emissions constraint actually I've deliberately used the word emissions there because we're here on a panel talking about zero carbon actually it could be zero emissions so you know we're in a increasingly emissions constrained and priced world and the key challenge for businesses particularly those who trade across borders are these two things how to stay internationally competitive and how to avoid investment and carbon leakage in the face of real uncertainty what others are doing and the asymmetric implementation of climate change policies across countries but of course there are the leaders who see the challenge and want to run at it and my friend here John and his council is one of those leaders so congratulations John that's fantastic and I imagine there are undoubtedly other organisations with representatives here who belong to this coalition well done I mean it's business doing what they do best leading not actually waiting for government to give them the answer so what business wants they'll be the key solution provider because ultimately it'll be the business community that will deliver on whatever the target is and so what we're striving for and in fact I'm delighted to say what we increasingly have with government is a more mature conversation about the nature of the targets and what it means across the business community because there's no single representative business there are businesses right across the spectrum from the heavy emitting energy intensive right through to your service based organisations for whom the task is somewhat easier and going back to the previous point we want a more predictable environment and hopefully a clear goal so it'll be interesting to see what we get out of the zero carbon bill and government's role of course and this is really important is that we want from government we want overall policy coherence so what we want to see is how all of those various parts of the puzzle fit together because they are incredibly complex and so we're wanting government which is what this government is absolutely doing signal ambition and provide leadership because as I said that will help catalyse greater effort by business and also we want greater cross agency collaboration at ministerial and official level to drive strategically coherent change and again we're seeing that I guess ultimately there we want the government to also do a bit of practice practicing what it preaches around sustainable procurement actually and while I've got the floor I'll finish with a shameless plug for a summit that we're holding at the end of this month it's theme is that of the 3Ds digitalisation, decarbonisation and decentralisation and actually how these forces are at play in the energy transition that we're all a witness to so if you're interested in coming along grab me at the end thanks very much I'll start with a plug don't forget free book well being Hi I'm Caroline Saunders thank you very much for the invite up from Lincoln University down in the sunny south island although it was a bit misty this day cool so I think I was brought here for the agricultural bit so sorry guys if you know in Auckland and I think one of the first things is agriculture is important and so if you go to this slide that agriculture 6.3 of GDP if you add on the processing industries it's 11.9 and then the other in direct industries probably a lot of jobs in Auckland you're getting up towards 20% of the economy and then there's the allied which would probably be in there 25% so you can't ignore it now my dream is that we get win-wins the agriculture you talked about change of land use it might be some land use practice that we get past this culture of more milk more grass more cows and churning the handle out that we get higher value in market for our agricultural products well a lot of what my day job is is finding out where are those premium segments in market we can get our paws on because New Zealand should be high value not low cost of anything high environmental value high social value high cultural value and get those values back to New Zealanders and why aren't we out there like when we were talking about the ETS 10 years ago whenever it was out there saying we are the only country in the world agriculture within some kind of carbon policy and I'll say at the minute whether it's ETS or not and sell ourselves right in that thing so thank you you fed right into that so that's one little rant okay so I thought I'd better look at something about agricultural energy use which to be honest wasn't a lot but you know agriculture about 4.8% for national consumption but when you add the other stuff it's up to around 30% so again reflecting with the importance of agriculture and the economy we've had an increase in energy consumption in New Zealand so let's see about bringing that back down but agriculture has increased by more and processing more than that and we're really reflecting the increase in dairy that's gone on combined consumption of agriculture so you've increased by 3% but our export value has gone up a little bit more than that we can remember in agriculture and I don't see this in the debate about the use of diesel, petrol or electricity it's the in agriculture it's the inputs so fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and all the other things that are used in agriculture but again the embodied capital and that's when we did the food miles report all those years ago that was the big difference between us and the UK market the other thing is that when we're looking at emissions one thing that doesn't plan in our favour is it tends to exclude emissions from shipping not that we do much air freight and the elephants in the room of course as others have talked about agriculture is the big one for greenhouse gas emissions with nitrous oxide 16% methane 32% and then you've got all the other little bits here so here's the big elephant in the room and thank God Amelia's here because she can explain to you in more detail than I ever could about the methane being a flow gas not a stock gas so I was lucky enough to be on a committee set up by Jacinda Ched by Peter Gluckman looking at what was there what could happen if you put agriculture into a lower carb to reduce the emissions in agriculture and so the kind of thing that's come out and Gluckman's reports out there you can get your polls on it is he's actually moved away from agriculture coming under the ETS I'm not saying it's where it's going to land there's some issues with agriculture and the issues trained one is how the hell do you measure it and in particular if you're going to have a measurement that has to stand up in court because of course biological emissions by their nature are variable and Oversea is a particular tool at the moment that good on it but it was never designed for that and there are issues around how they're measured it's also a big issue around point of obligation they want to scheme in and incentivise farmers to do things but to have the point of obligation at the farmer would be really tricky so they're talking either processing companies and or some sector bodies might even do that the one that Gluckman's come out with is farm management plans now there are these environmental farm management plans that are being implemented across the country particularly for the pastoral sector and whether to incorporate greenhouse gas emissions reduction in there with maybe a fine or something if they don't meet it so another way of this being implemented big debate about whether we include or exclude methane and right with Amelia we need to bring it down but is it a separate gas is it a separate policy for that the billion trees being mentioned and we've got the nitrate limits the water nitrate limits I'm concerned that we've got policies everywhere like you said and they're being developed in silos we've not got the conversation across neither at the farm level I think a lot's going to matter about the rules of the game what counts as a tree is it a shelter belt is it a small planting there's gossip at the moment, well it's not gossip people on banks peninsula that funny little bit that sticks out near Christchurch are buying tracks of land to plant Pinus Radiatoran and it's the last thing you probably want there as you said we need that debate about what we want where and it staggered me how little the billion trees would go towards reducing our emissions profile and help us towards a carbon zero economy so win-wins though get out there get more true value for what we do and everything from New Zealand should be high value not low cost thank you