Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Māori leaders are opposing the New Zealand government's climate change bill, which has been introduced to parliament. Tuku Morgan, chair of the leaders' group, said that the legislation threatens rights to manage land under the Waitangi Treaty. In their submission on the proposed legislation last year, Te Runanga A Iwi O Ngapuhi (TRAION), representing the descendants of Ngapuhi, criticized the consultative process and argued that their forests should be exempt from deforestation taxes. TRAION also wants credits to be available for forests established before 1990.

The government holds that their climate change policy would have significant benefits for Māori. An emissions trading scheme covering carbon credits from forestry would present options for economic opportunities, according to Parekura Horomia, Māori affairs minister. Māori are inextricably linked to and involved with the sustainable management and use of natural resources through the intergenerational exercise of kaitiakitanga. Climate change is a global issue that will impact on the relationship Māori have with the environment and in our use of natural resources, particularly in our coastal communities," he continued. "Many areas of Māori land are steep and in regions vulnerable to storm and erosion. With the onset of climate change, these lands will be even more exposed with the predicted arrival of more frequent and severe storms, and more droughts in the east of New Zealand."

New investment in clean energy may reach US$7 trillion by the year 2030, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), international energy advisers with a head office in the United States. The main drivers will be high oil prices and environmental concerns. A major shift in public opinion "is providing a vital impetus that is moving clean technology across the great divide of cost, proven results, scale and maturity that has separated it from markets served by mainstream technologies," said Daniel Yergin, CERA's chairman.

Wind power is likely to make the greatest gains, followed by solar power and biofuels. Current biofuel technology, the report concludes, is constrained by competition for land with food crops and relatively high production costs. Significant cost and technology hurdles must first be overcome if next generation technology is to convert more plentiful non-food biomass into fuel. The report notes a "bubbling" of clean energy clusters, with Brazil specializing in biofuels, Germany photovoltaic technology and Spain wind power.

"India is prepared to commit that our per-capita carbon emissions will never exceed the average per-capita emissions of developed industrial economies," Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, announced at the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit 2008. He repeated India's call for climate justice. "We cannot continue with a global development model in which some countries continue to maintain high carbon emissions, while the development options available for developing countries get constrained," he said.

Prior to the Delhi summit, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, expressed frustration at what he saw as India's lack of commitment to greenhouse gas emissions reduction. India will release a national plan to deal with the threat of global warming in June. The prime minister's Council on Climate Change has been asked consider the establishment of a venture capital fund to promote clean technologies, improve energy efficiency and avert climate impacts on the nation's poor.