Wellington Regional Council's bold climate targets look more like dreams
I’m tired of government announcing goals for taking action on climate change rather than actually taking action on climate change.
I’ve stumbled on a recent example: in 2021 the Greater Wellington Regional Council set a pretty ambitious goal.
They wanted to cut the amount of carbon we create from moving around the region by 35% by 2030.
That’s a huge change when you put it into numbers. It means that all the cars, trains, trucks, scooters, bikes and vans in the region have to go from making 1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in one year to making 770 thousand tonnes.
Big, ambitious goal. A north star on which all of the region’s transport decisions must work to achieve.
In 2021, this ambitious target also came with a graph showing exactly how they will do it.
A nice, neat 3% decrease in our pollution every year for 12 years.
This is the best case scenario – in which we still have more frequent devastating flooding, the sea eats away at coastal properties and harsher heatwaves kill more people. It’s best case scenario because it limits climate change’s strength and intensity: Petone’s waterfront will be eaten by the ocean but the centre of Petone won’t be under sea level.
3% a year sounds achievable… How are we going?
We’re nowhere close. In fact, we’ve decreased emissions by 3% over five years. And the only reason we’ve achieved that is because the country was in lockdown for months on end in response to COVID-19. It’s easy to achieve your transport goals if nobody leaves their house.
Yet the Regional Council has said this about how well we’re doing:
"While our transport-related CO2 emissions have been trending downwards since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it is unclear if this is the start of an ongoing trend or a result of temporary, COVID-19-related behaviour changes.”
Come on. Of course it’s a temporary effect of COVID. Very little has changed to make people drive less and use the bus or the train (which belch significantly less carbon) instead.
In so many metrics, the experience of taking public transport has gotten worse.
The bus is late more frequently, and you’re left waiting 64% longer for a late bus than in 2018. Cancellations are higher, roadworks and traffic slow down journeys, and to top it all off the trains won’t run on the weekends with any consistency for the next 15 years.
The suburbs that were built with cars in mind have been left behind by bus timetables. Good luck if you want to catch a bus more frequently than once an hour. It won’t even take you to where you need to go.
Plus, according to my partner, the 230 bus smells like celery every time she takes it. She likes celery though, so this is probably a positive thing.
When you have a public transport system designed to be second class, people will use cars.
But, we need people to use cars less. If we keep spending more time in cars and belching more carbon, more of the sea will eat up more houses. More storms will kill more people. More crops will fail because of stronger heatwaves and longer droughts.
It sounds like alarmism, but you have to remember that we’re already seeing storms with a ferocity we’ve never seen before. Onions were shitty and expensive last year because Cyclone Gabrielle fucked the crop. We’ll see more deadly storms than Gabrielle again and again in a warmer world – and we have precious time left to stop storms like that from happening every year.
The Council cannot expect people to give up their cars when we make cars the easiest option.
So Wellington has this challenge: cutting 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from how we get around, now in six years instead of 12.
Wellington Regional Council needs to achieve this through changes to how we get around – they need to make buses, trains, biking and walking the most attractive way to get around across the whole region.
And if the Regional Council want to save thousands of houses from becoming worthless in the next thirty years because they’re going to be in harms way from frequent and devastating flooding, they need to do it quickly.
The Greater Wellington Regional Council has a key mechanism they can use. It’s where they put their ambitious goal. It’s very sexily known as the Wellington Regional Land Transport Plan (WRLTP). In this article, I’m going to call it The Big Plan.
The Big Plan outlines exactly what the projects are that Wellington wants to spend money on in the next ten to thirty years. It’s agreed to by all the different city councils, stakeholders like KiwiRail, and determines what the region requests money for from the Ministry of Transport. This is The Big Plan for a reason.
It’s updated every six years, and has a review every three years. This year is our review.
There are some pretty cool things the council is bidding for: bus corridors in central Wellington, trains running every 10 minutes, and significant upgrades for an all electric bus fleet.
The problem though?
So many of the projects that will get significant numbers of people to travel differently won’t be done before 2030.
In fact, of the top 10 projects the Regional Council wants money to achieve, all the things that will get done before 2030 are figuring out how to make public transport better after 2030. Stuff like adding more power stations to charge buses and making sure that the trains run consistently at 15 minutes (which was a goal the system was supposed to achieve in 2013).
Don’t get me wrong, these are great things that need to be done. But why is it that making the trains run every 10 minutes is scheduled to happen in 2033 at the earliest?
Why is it that we won’t have the appropriate train signals in place so we can run more trains until after the deadline for our carbon reductions?
Why are we not building out a world class bus system to support travel within the Hutt or Porirua or Paraparaumu? The most car-locked parts of our region are getting basically no bus corridors.
Also? This plan which has a lofty goal of reducing car travel by 25% and emissions by 35% in six years has BILLIONS of dollars dedicated to more roads for cars.
So much of this plan depends on government funding, and this government loves the idea of building stuff for cars. There’s good odds the only thing that gets government funding is the bare minimum for train maintenance and all the money for roads.
So why did it get included?
I asked advisors at the Regional Council whether they had any emissions impact data on any of these projects, and they said they didn’t.
I asked if they have the power to stop projects that will increase carbon emissions from being included. The committee said they did, if they had a unanimous vote. I asked if they ever voted on a project to kill it. They said they never had.
I asked if the Wellington Transport Emissions Reduction Plan, the “foundations for the transformative and urgent change required” had any effect over which projects were prioritised in The Big Plan.
It doesn’t. Because of course it doesn’t.
I can’t stress this enough. We have six years to achieve their goal. And the council doesn’t have a clue what the things they are planning to build will affect the amount of carbon we create?
The Regional Council even acknowledges that the current rate of change won’t get us anywhere close to where we need to be. They said:
“Maintaining the current rate of reduction in transport generated CO2 would not be enough for the region to meet the 2030 headline target”.
We have to assume that the status quo is what we’re heading for – because the Regional Council has planned for nothing game-changing to be achieved before 2030.
This is the same Greater Wellington Regional Council that itself declared a climate emergency – and said that "Every significant decision the Council makes will consider a robust analysis of whether the proposal would increase or decrease our carbon emissions” – five years ago.
Imagine if another kind of emergency happened – a forest fire threatening where people live. Imagine if the Council said that’s an emergency – we need to act! Imagine then that the same Council saw the fire burning just as ferociously five years later, and decided to make a plan that might make a big difference to the fire in another seven to nine years.
Responding to climate change is hard. I know it is. New Zealand has to build a significant amount of renewable energy, change roads, electrify every appliance and do so within 10-25 years.
It’s the most complex problem humanity has had to face.
But that complexity is a reason to start now and start acting quickly.
Right now, there is no sense of urgency to an urgent problem. Decision makers brag about a target with no teeth and hope for the best that people will take inconvenient, unreliable and annoying transport to work, shop and feed their kids.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Look at Paris. 40% reduction in pollution in 10 years. Look at Wellington City. The City Council built 50km of cycleways in two years.
I refuse to believe that we can’t do anything about cutting carbon fast unless everyone wants to cut carbon now. It’s simply not true.
It takes guts and it takes trying something new. It takes challenging the assumption that things need to be done a certain way.
I’ve skimmed the Land Transport Management Act which outlines the need for The Big Plan. In Section 14, it says that these plans need to contribute towards ensuring environmental sustainability.
There’s a pretty easy argument that The Big Plan does not do that – because we have no chance of meeting climate targets in time even if central government funds everything.
When will someone stand up and say let’s take away infrastructure for fossil fuels so electric buses and trains become the best way to get around. When will we stop putting responsibility onto someone else to finally do something?
I am begging you, Greater Wellington Regional Council. Cancel these carbon belching projects. Pull every lever you can, and try take action where you’ve previously assumed you can’t.
Live up to your promises.
People want to see change. Give it to them.
