Improve your carbon footprint

The world is going through a green revolution and New Zealand is taking the lead. Every sector is shifting towards more environmentally friendly operations and has taken a serious commitment to fight climate change. Climate change, deforestation, overgrazing, fisheries collapse, food instability, and species extinction are all symptoms of a larger issue. Humanity is asking more from the Earth than it can deliver. Science fraternity, governments, and even corporates are doing break though work to conserve our ecosystem. But why did it come to that?

New Zealand is not unknown to climate change as it had recently experienced the effects of the Australian bushfire. The New Zealand sky was illuminating orange because of the smog coming from 3000 km away.

The term “carbon footprint”  is now commonly used as a shorthand for the quantity of carbon emitted by us (mostly in tonnes). Due to the constant abuse of the natural resources, there isn’t enough biocapacity in our atmosphere to absorb the carbon emissions contributing to the increase of more greenhouse gas. The earth is turning into a red hot globe and is already into the early stages of Mars-like transformations.

The foundations of the greenhouse effect lie in the 19th century when French mathematician Joseph Fourier concluded in 1824 that the Earth would be a lot colder on the off chance that it had no atmosphere. In 1896, Swedish researcher Svante Arrhenius was one of the first people to state that carbon dioxide gas emitted from the burning of fossil fuels made a great impact on our atmosphere. Almost a century later, American environment researcher James E. Hansen testified to Congress that “The greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now."

The top 5 carbon-emitting countries in the world are China, USA, India, Russia, and Japan. CO2 levels have risen dramatically as a result of the industrial revolution and the exponential growth of manufacturing activity all over the world. Climate change is the ultimate impact of high carbon footprints. There have been natural emissions of greenhouse gases on earth but due to human activity of higher carbon emissions, it has added to the warming of the planet. From 1990 to 2005, carbon dioxide emissions drastically increased by 31%. The decade from 2010 to 2019 was recorded as the warmest decade worldwide.

Carbon emissions are the reason for fast depleting resources that includes large-scale deforestation to the use of home air conditioning. Vehicles running on fossil fuel contribute highly to climate change. We need to shift towards more renewable resources and conservation of the existing energy to balance the energy demand of the world.

High carbon emissions have very adverse environmental and health impacts. It highly contributes to climate change by trapping heat into our atmosphere. One of the most common health effects of high carbon emissions is respiratory diseases. Extreme weather change, disruptions in the food supply are other examples of the effects of a high carbon footprint. The weather patterns that we have seen till now are constantly changing, some of the species will go extinct and some will either evolve or adapt to the extreme climate change.

Almost every sector of the global economy must from manufacturing to power production to agriculture to transportation should move away from using fossil fuels and use more renewable energy supplies. The world has acknowledged the reality of this in the Paris Climate Change Agreement of 2015. The world powers are already taking significant steps for ramping down the carbon emissions but reducing the use of fossil fuels, encouraging the use of renewable energy, boosting energy efficiency, and discouraging carbon emission activities by putting heavy taxes on them and encouraging a more clean and green environment.

According to New Zealand Foreign Affairs and Trade, New Zealand had taken a serious commitment in the Paris Agreement and is actively participating in the conservation of our ecosystem. 

Our emission reduction targets are:

·        to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030

·        an unconditional target to reduce our emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2020

·        a conditional target to reduce New Zealand’s emissions to between 10% and 20% below our 1990 levels by 2020

·        to reduce our emissions to 50% below 1990 levels by 2050.

New Zealand government is also coming up with fee bates and schemes like Clean Car Standard, which will kick in 2023 and is designed to decrease the carbon footprint of the vehicle fleet in New Zealand. The standard initially established the average emissions of new and old imported light vehicles at a carbon emission limit of 139 grams per kilometre. The limit will be lowered to 128 g / km in 2024 and adjusted again to 105 g / km in 2025.

Recently in 2021, the government showed a strong stance in shifting their whole vehicle fleet to electric vehicles. This shows the government is fiercely committed to setting a CO2 emissions target of 105 grams per kilometre by 2025.

In May 2021, Finance Minister Grant Robertson announced that it has set aside $302 million for an anonymous policy to "implement a system that encourages the adoption of low-emission vehicles." It is not clear whether the plan is just a subsidy or whether it will also increase the price of gasoline consumers, but climate minister James Shaw said that the plan will form a “widely similar design” to the fee bate that was introduced earlier.

As Kiwis, we have a moral responsibility to conserve our natural environment and keep our Aotearoa clean & green.