The Government will pour a further $338.8 million over the next four years into new science and commercialisation of new products to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture – New Zealand’s largest single source of emissions at 50% of the total.
The investment will ramp up, with some $28m committed in the year to June 2023, $64.8m in 2023-24, and $123.7m in 2024-25, the final year of the government’s first emissions budget.
A further $122.2m is committed in 2025-26, the first year of the second emissions budget, to reduce emissions further in the five years to the end of 2030.
The largest single element of this new spend is the creation of a new Centre for Climate Action on Agricultural Emissions that is intended to give more impetus to the existing NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, established by the previous National-led government in the mid-2010s.
“The largest single element of this new spend is the creation of a new Centre for Climate Action on Agricultural Emissions that is intended to give more impetus to the existing NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre.”
The new centre will “include a public-private joint venture focused on developing and commercialising practical tools to reduce emissions”.
Talks to create the joint venture are already well advanced, the documents released today say, but give no detail of the participants or timeline for implementing it.
“Streamlined paths to market” and demonstration programmes to establish on-farm viability are identified as major aims of the new centre.
Some $6.3m is allocated to establish the pricing of agricultural emissions – primarily nitrous oxide and methane – in the emissions trading scheme (ETS) and $34.7m is allocated over four years to support farmers, growers and Māori entities to implement low emissions farming systems.
Funding for forestry initiatives, including to scale up native forestry planting to act as permanent carbon sinks, totals $256.2m over four years.
An additional $73.5m is committed to enabling the planting of 10,000 hectares of forests for use in providing woody biomass to replace fossil fuels in industrial and other heat production.
Elsewhere, initiatives in forestry, production of woody biomass to reduce fossil fuel use in favour of “green” fuels, and policies to bring agriculture into some form of emissions pricing by 2025 sees a total of $710m committed to agricultural emissions reduction efforts over the next four years.
