Pete Hodgson

Pete Hodgson

Today the Kyoto Protocol comes into force and a new era in tackling climate change quietly gets under way. New Zealand is one of 141 nations to have ratified the protocol so far. All developed nations have ratified, except the United States, Australia and Monaco.

These days the scientific consensus is almost total - climate change is coming ready or not. The sceptics are receding, just like the Arctic ice-sheet. But there is still uncertainty about the precise degree of climate change and its particular effect on different parts of the world.

We know what the changes will be in general - higher temperatures, more floods, more storm surges, more hurricanes, more droughts, rising sea levels. But how much more?

The first of these changes, higher temperatures, illustrates the point. Over the past 100 years world temperatures rose by 0.6deg. Almost all the record years for high temperatures have been in the past decade or so. But the forecast for the next 100 years is a rise of 1.4 to 5.8deg.

So things are getting hotter, but precisely by how much is unclear. At 1.4deg, it is about a twofold increase; at 5.8deg, it is nearly tenfold.

Climate change is a global problem and can, therefore, be tackled only if many nations club together. No one country can, by itself, make a useful difference. The Kyoto Protocol is the instrument by which such an international response can be mounted.

For a century or more New Zealanders have joined international efforts to combat threats - wars, drift netting, ozone depletion, terrorism. So it is with climate change. We seek to do our bit.

New Zealanders also sense that climate change directly challenges our own environment and way of life. Storms seem to be more common as the effects of climate change start to bite. In general, people are inclined to the view that the weather is unusual or different.

Our economy is more dependent on a reliable, equable climate than any other Western nation because agriculture is such a large part of it.

For New Zealanders, avoiding the worst effects of climate change is, therefore, a significant economic advantage. We have a strong economic self-interest in blunting its extremes.

The Kyoto Protocol will drive significant technology shifts in the years ahead. Progressively, New Zealand businesses will act to avoid the prices on greenhouse gases. Or they will capitalise on them by developing products or technologies that increase efficiency, or avoid greenhouse-gas production altogether, then sell those technologies into a newly receptive world market.

New Zealanders have a proven capacity to innovate, to invent our own solutions and to rapidly adopt technologies developed by others. The Government has a programme of incentives to assist those technology shifts, and about $150 million worth of carbon credits are available in the economy today.