This time last year we were in the midst of cleaning up from climate-change-charged Auckland Anniversary flooding – just as Cyclone Gabrielle hit.
New Zealanders lost their lives in land slips and immense water. Homes and businesses were destroyed. Community halls and marae were turned into refuges. Our long-underinvested infrastructure, once again, was overwhelmed.
We saw our communities’ values in practice as neighbours helped neighbours and strangers alike.
In Auckland Central, we made a civil defence centre out of the city centre's Ellen Melville Hall, coordinated and directed hundreds of volunteers to assist in the clean-up effort and built our own working centralised support resources list, working in collaboration with NGOs and community services.
After months and years of ever-increasingly severe weather ravaging the East Coast, West Coast, top of the South and Northland, climate change had arrived on the doorstep of our largest city. It was no longer abstract, or in the future. It is our now.
We are living in a climate changed by human activity. The question then, as it is now, is whether we are comfortable to continue pushing this boundary, knowing clear as day the consequences it brings in the form of all the more frequent and unequally felt destruction and devastation.
The Greens spent the following year, as we have the last 30, continuing to mobilise, advocate and work for climate mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (changing our built environment to better cope with increased flooding, drought and extreme weather). Good climate policy, as it happens, tends to be both.
That’s why I’ve spent my time as your local representative so engaged with Auckland Council and successive mayors trying to plant and protect urban trees, grow the efficiency and connectivity of our public transport network, develop more accessible walking and cycling networks, build and encourage denser, high-quality housing, grow green infrastructure and support community food gardens.
These things also, as it happens, improve people's lives. Scientists and policy advisors call them ‘co-benefits’. Policies like those listed above can improve people’s physical and mental health, forge greater community connection and reduce loneliness, reduce household costs and benefit local businesses with more foot traffic.
In Parliament, throughout my past six years and the Greens’ constructively critical relationship with the former government, we wrangled more action on the climate than in the past 30 years.
We’re talking establishing the Independent Climate Commission, the Zero Carbon Act’s legal processes to help get us to carbon neutrality by 2050, ending offshore oil and gas exploration and new drilling, improving water quality standards, reducing costs for public transport, increasing protection for food-growing soils and the Hauraki Gulf.
Almost all of this is on the chopping block under the new Government who, in their first few weeks, also killed the Clean Car Discount (which their own advice outlines will cost double what it saves and generate a colossal challenge for our transport emissions budget) among a slate of other legal changes to make life evidently more difficult and expensive for workers, public transport users and anyone who wants any decent, objective data on the fairness of our tax system.
The Government has also promised to re-open offshore oil and gas exploration and ‘promote the use of Crown minerals’ (read: mining) at the same time as The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Environment Programme, the International Energy Agency, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development all conclude that new fossil fuel exploration would be inconsistent with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.
Still, I hold out an immense and earnest hope that has somehow kept me afloat the entire time I’ve been in politics that we can get on track with the evidence. Like partisan beliefs fell away in the midst of the flooding and people helped each other, I strongly believe New Zealanders will join the movement to organise and coordinate to keep politicians accountable to the future we all deserve.
As Paul Hawken said, “We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one. This is the human agenda.” (Chlöe Swarbrick)
Chlöe Swarbrick, T: 09 378 4810, E: chloe.swarbrick@parliament.govt.nz
www.greens.org.nz/chloe_swarbrick
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February 2024