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a pink tinged island with water around it and there is images of money in the waves
As the water rises, the question of how climate action is funded becomes more relevant. Pictured: an island in Kiribati. (Image: The Spinoff/Getty Images)

PoliticsSeptember 13, 2024

New Zealand isn’t doing enough to fund climate action. This is how we know

a pink tinged island with water around it and there is images of money in the waves
As the water rises, the question of how climate action is funded becomes more relevant. Pictured: an island in Kiribati. (Image: The Spinoff/Getty Images)

Climate funding is an essential part of the agreements used to reduce the impact of climate change. But is New Zealand contributing our fair share? 

At the Pacific Islands Forum held in Tonga in August, climate change was a key topic. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, described how the stakes of climate change were incredibly high for Pacific countries. “If we save the Pacific, we also save ourselves,” he said. A major discussion at the forum was a climate and disaster resilience fund announced earlier this year, aiming to reach $US500m by January 1, 2026. Australia, China and the US – all major players in the Pacific, as well as significant fossil fuel producers – have pledged to commit funding. 

So far, New Zealand hasn’t. “We’ll have more to say very shortly,” prime minister Christopher Luxon said during the forum in Tonga, as reported by RNZ. Aotearoa already gives Pacific countries $325m a year of climate-specific funding. But with the world getting warmer, disasters becoming more common and the Pacific one of the most vulnerable, contested areas, are we doing enough? 

“Fairness is essential – it’s the glue that holds the world together. We can’t respond to the climate crisis if it’s each to their own,” says Olivia Yates, a climate change researcher at World Vision. In collaboration with Oxfam, the organisation has recently released a report investigating what New Zealand’s fair share of climate finance is, by calculating New Zealand’s overall gross national income and how much we’ve contributed to climate change. 

a woman with brown hair and pale skin wearing a huge smile and big glasses, a dork orange shirt and black jacket with trees in the background
Olivia Yates researches climate change at World Vision (Photo: Supplied)

For the first time, the research went beyond emissions since 1992 (when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed), and calculated New Zealand’s historical contributions since 1850. “When we calculate emissions since 1850, New Zealand’s fair share increases, because of the impact of deforestation that was caused by colonisation, and the impact of the agriculture sector,” Yates says. The numbers aren’t inspiring: based on the 1992 calculation, New Zealand’s $325m pledged contribution to climate finance was 58% of a fair contribution. But when emissions since 1850 are taken into account, New Zealand’s pledge is barely a third of what we’re responsible for, at 34%. It’s one of the many climate commitments New Zealand isn’t currently meeting. 

Climate finance, and the many international agreements that govern it, can seem like the boring side of the climate crisis. Details about how to calculate who pays, how much, and where the money goes can feel trivial in comparison to the visceral stuff: holding a roof down in a cyclone, watching crops wither because they are inundated with salt water, the smell of piles of rotting fish killed by a marine heatwave. But these details (and the many initialisms that accompany them) matter, because the damage climate change is causing now, and the damage that will happen in the future, affect different communities unevenly. 

“What we see with global patterns of climate change is that the countries most affected are paying more to service debt than they receive in aid from wealthy countries,” Yates says. In the report, which Yates co-authored, New Zealand’s contribution to climate finance is compared to other similarly-sized wealthy countries: Finland, Denmark and Ireland. Each has pledged more to climate financing than Aotearoa. Denmark, particularly, is well ahead, with $NZ1.46 billion pledged to lower-income countries. “After assessing historical emissions, we lag behind – we have a larger responsibility to provide our fair share of climate finance,” Yates says.

According to Yates’ and her colleagues’ calculations, New Zealand is responsible for 0.38% (for emissions since 1992) to 0.66% (for emissions since 1850) of the world’s climate commitments. That’s a fraction of a percent – but given that the global climate goal, set at Cop15 in 2009, is $NZ146 billion a year ($US100 billion), that means New Zealand should be contributing $558m-$953m to climate financing each year. That could be more after Cop29 in Azerbaijan in November, where it’s expected that a new, higher goal for climate finance will be set. 

an older brown man with a rocky shore and the sea behind him and a shock of curly white hair
Festus Ahikau is a grandfather of 10. He's lived in Makira Island in the Solomon Islands since 2015. He lost his beachfront home to the sea in January 2020 and such destructive tides are becoming more common, and has had to move inland. (Image: Supplied by World Vision)

But there’s another big question in climate finance, too: is the money simply being repurposed from existing aid budgets? New Zealand has a set amount of international aid (called “official development assistance” or ODA by the UN) money – much of which is being repurposed as climate finance. There are obvious overlaps between the goals: money that builds stronger houses that can withstand increasingly frequent cyclones can alleviate a social need for  housing and increase climate resilience simultaneously. 

Rules known as Rio markers determine whether funding is going to biodiversity, desertification or climate change objectives and how much of it can count as climate financing. But, Yates says, these markers can still be ambiguous. “They might say this particular project supports mitigation or increases resilience, but climate change isn’t integrated into the projects.” 

While climate change is an urgent issue for many low-income countries – especially the Pacific countries New Zealand has committed to send a majority of aid funding to – that doesn’t mean that other initiatives don’t need funding too. “Countries on the frontline of climate change are often so battered that critical funding for women’s rights or supporting education or reducing gender-based violence all goes into recovering from a cyclone,” Yates says. In Vanuatu, for example, 61% of the country’s GDP went to recovering from Cyclone Harold and Covid in 2020. “When so much money goes into recovering from the damage, there’s less funding for the whole community,” Yates says. (World Vision does extensive work in Vanuatu.)

three people, an woman in a graphic tshirt, a yount boy of about thirteen in a green tshirt and a grandma with a curly afro, with mangroves and the saw in the background, looking a bit glum
Grandmother Mae Kosui with her daughter-in-law Loretta Boru, and her grandson Timothy, 13. The family has had to move from the island as it gets smaller due to sea level rise. (Photo: Supplied by World Vision)

The quality of aid funding matters: while multilateral loans can count as part of climate financing, aid organisations like Oxfam and World Vision consider public grants to be the best form of funding, giving communities more autonomy over how money can be spent. According to the Oxfam report, only 20% of Ireland’s funding reaches the community level. That said, only 8.6% of its overall climate finance comes from its foreign aid budget.

“It’s important to have funding and finance for separate components of a fair and equitable society – not just climate change,” Yates says. That might be difficult, with New Zealand’s aid funding already in the spotlight. Foreign minister Winston Peters has promised a review of the spending following $30m of cuts to areas outside the Pacific and Southeast Asia in the May budget. 

While the details of climate financing can be confusing, they’re also important, and sure to be hotly debated at the next Cop conference. Yates would like to see funding for efforts to adapt to the effects of global heating and mitigating the emissions that cause it clearly delineated. Money for responding to loss and damage caused by climate change is essential too. At the Pacific Islands Forum, in international meetings and at the next Cop, advocates want the questions of climate finance to stay on the table. “We have an opportunity to stand with the Pacific, stand with children and communities, to create a fairer and stronger finance target,” Yates says. 

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Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump at the start of the presidential debate in Philadelphia, September 10, 2024. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump at the start of the presidential debate in Philadelphia, September 10, 2024. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

PoliticsSeptember 12, 2024

Was the Trump-Harris debate an election game-changer?

Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump at the start of the presidential debate in Philadelphia, September 10, 2024. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump at the start of the presidential debate in Philadelphia, September 10, 2024. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

An in-control Kamala Harris won the night by baiting her opponent into increasingly incoherent rage. And then Taylor Swift weighed in.

This is an excerpt from The World Bulletin, our weekly global current affairs newsletter exclusively for Spinoff Members. Sign up here.

Trump takes the bait

The debate’s first question was about the high cost of living, and Donald Trump responded with an allegation about undocumented immigrants taking American jobs: “They’re taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings,” he said. “They’re going in violently.”

It might have been his most lucid, on-message answer of the entire night. Within minutes, the former president had grown visibly angry, apparently prompted by Harris’s sly reference to the Wharton School of Economics, which Trump attended as a young man. “It was an artful way to trigger him, and it worked instantly,” wrote Olivia Nuzzi at NY Magazine (soft paywall).

He quickly returned to his racist attacks, repeating a lie currently popular in rightwing circles about Haitian immigrants in Ohio devouring pets. “In Springfield they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he insisted. “It’s like [Harris] is debating MAGA Twitter come to life. Victor Orban, dead pets, Ashli Babbitt, ‘J6’, noted ‘Never Trump’ conservative David French on X.

For all his base-friendly bluster, a brief answer about healthcare may turn out to have been Trump’s most important rhetorical moment. Responding to a question about his planned replacement for Obamacare, the popular healthcare law he has spent nine years threatening to repeal, Trump pleaded that he had “the concepts of a plan” (his whiny tone really needs to be heard to be fully appreciated). The soundbite was seemingly “tailor-made for Democratic attack ads on a topic that is of searing personal interest to millions of Americans”, according to the Hill.

A sceptical Kamala Harris looks on as Donald Trump answers a debate question. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Harris takes control

Harris, meanwhile, looked in control from the start. Among her best moments was a powerful answer on abortion rights, delivered early in the debate, that blamed Trump for the repeal of Roe vs Wade during his tenure and warned that he would usher in a nationwide abortion ban were he to become president again. Then she went after Trump for inciting the violent mob at the US Capitol: “So for everyone watching who remembers what January 6th was, I say we don’t have to go back… And if that was a bridge too far for you, well, there is a place in our campaign for you. To stand for country. To stand for our democracy. To stand for rule of law. And to end the chaos.”

More consequential than any particular answer, however, was the difference between her own composure and Trump’s increasingly incoherent fuming, wrote NY Mag’s Jonathan Chait (soft paywall): “She established herself as presidential by appearing calm and confident, in vivid contrast to the bellowing lunatic on the stage beside her.”

The immediate reaction

Unsurprisingly, Harris was deemed the runaway winner of the debate. “She probably had the best night of any of Trump’s debate opponents since he began running for president in 2015,” said Eugene Daniels of Politico. “Tonight was just devastating,” said veteran newsman Chris Wallace on CNN. “It was a shutout on almost every subject I can think of. Trump looked angry, scowling, and old.”

Even Trump’s supporters had to concede their candidate had a very bad night. “She crushed him,” a Republican battleground strategist told Politico. Senator Lindsey Graham, usually one of Trump’s most unquestioning loyalists, said it had been a “disaster” and Trump’s debate team should be fired.

Ultimately, it’s the voters’ opinion that matters, however – and they seem to agree that Harris took it in a walk. A snap CNN poll of debate watchers found she had won 63% to 37%, with many voters especially impressed by her answer on reproductive rights. Harris adviser David Plouffe tweeted that the campaign’s internal live polling showed a “40 point difference with undecided voters on their abortion answers. Widest gap I’ve ever seen in debate dials.”

In an election this tight, a marginal increase in support among key swing-state voters can make all the difference; the opinions of well-paid political commentators and enthusiastic campaign supporters matter a whole lot less. After all, as journalist Julia Ioffe wryly noted on X, “Hilary Clinton also won the debates against Donald Trump.”

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Taylor Swift speaks up

Shortly after the debate ended, the world’s most popular musician issued a statement on Instagram. Taylor Swift said she would be voting for Kamala Harris, calling her a “warrior” and a “steady-handed, gifted leader”, adding that she was “so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades”. She signed the statement “childless cat lady”, a reference to remarks made by Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, in 2021. In an interview, Vance said Democrats were promoting an “anti-family” agenda led by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.

While the Harris campaign has stayed quiet on the precise coordination of the Swift statement, it’s well-established that the narrative coming out of a presidential debate is just as important as 90-minute event itself (hence the existence of the post-debate “spin room”, where campaign surrogates are tasked with arguing that their candidate just won). In that context, the timing of Swift’s announcement – which yesterday helped land a potentially devastating one-two punch on Trump – was nothing short of impeccable.

More reading, watching and listening

Read:

Republicans dismayed by Trump’s ‘bad’ and ‘unprepared’ debate performance (The Guardian)

Trump never looked at Harris in the eye, and eight more body language tells from the presidential debate (Politico)

Now the debate is over, here’s what to expect in the sprint to Election Day – and beyond (CNN)

Polling guru Nate Silver’s latest election forecast (Silver Bulletin)

Wait, Kamala Harris owns a gun? (Vox)

Listen:

Harris baits Trump: inside their fiery debate (NYT’s The Daily podcast)

Alpha Harris (The Bulwark’s Next Level podcast)

Harris had a theory of Trump, and it was right (The Ezra Klein Show)

Watch:

Fact-checker extraordinaire Daniel Dale corrects Trump’s many false claims during the debate (CNN)

Jon Stewart’s extended segment on the debate (The Daily Show / YouTube)