Whanganui District Council appoints climate change and sustainability officer

Caroline Arrowsmith shoots down Drews Ave on her electric bike. Photo / Bevan Conley

In two years' time, Caroline Arrowsmith wants Whanganui District Council to be setting an example in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

She'd also like to see an energetic and hopeful community drive toward sustainability and resilience.

Arrowsmith is the council's new climate change and sustainability officer, appointed in December. Aided by policy manager Elise Broadbent, she'll have a $200,000 annual budget.

The council was just starting its climate change journey but it had a strategy developed with iwi and agreed in June 2021, Arrowsmith said.

Mayor Hamish McDouall, Jill Sheehy, Hannah Rainforth and Chris Shenton are part of the Horizons Region Climate Action Joint Committee and district councillor Alan Taylor wants to run the climate change lens over every decision.

Making sure that happens will be a priority for Arrowsmith.

She will be available to work with community groups on their chosen goals for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and for sustainability.

New to the job, she said she was looking forward to meeting people who were already active - speaking at the Sustainable Whanganui AGM and the UCOL orientation and being at the Whanganui River Markets.

One of her first priorities is getting the council's greenhouse gas emissions audited, then reduced. She needs to decide which entity will do the audit, then use its findings to choose the best reductions.

"We really want to [find] the best engineering options to get those really big savings."

It was for the Government to create a national climate change strategy, Arrowsmith said. She would drive it at the council level.

There was a lot that individuals could do, but she said working collectively had more power - writing submissions, planting trees, taking up a cycle challenge.

She saw a real connection between waste and climate change.

Sending organic material like food and green waste to landfill produces greenhouse gases like methane. And throwing away usable objects wastes the emissions "embedded" in their production and distribution.

Climate change was going to impact every aspect of people's lives but the changes they would have to make would have a lot of benefits, Arrowsmith said.

More walking and cycling would make people healthier, more public transport would reduce air and noise pollution, more gardening would make food supply more resilient.

"We don't have to constantly use the dreaded phrase 'climate change'."

Arrowsmith has an honours degree in classics and has spent two years learning about sustainable lifestyles by travelling in the Working Weekends on Organic Farms network.

Her most recent work was as an educator at the not-for-profit Sustainability Trust in Wellington, where she taught fruit tree workshops and helped run Wilderkids school holiday programmes and set up community composting schemes.

To contact her, email caroline.arrowsmith@whanganui.govt.nz.