Ross Inglis
If you’ve ever wondered why a yawning chasm lies between New Zealand’s climate ambitions and what we actually do about them, here’s a sobering example that helps explain it.
It’s Auckland’s Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway, or TERP. It’s a policy or, if you like, a strategy originally intended to put a big dent in the city’s transport emissions. Four years into its eight-year lifespan and it is nowhere near on track. The TERP is withering on the vine.
A little history. The TERP was born in August 2022, the child of Auckland Councils of a rather more progressive blush than our current one. It arrived at a time when the climate crisis wasn’t being quietly ignored: The city had declared a climate emergency in 2019 and later the following year followed up with Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri, Auckland’s Climate Plan.
The new climate plan was ambitious – it aimed to cut the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 against a 2016 baseline. It identified a number of areas where cuts could be found but it was transport, which was felt to offer more scope for reductions, that was asked to trim the most – 64 percent across the region.
So how is it faring? A council update on the TERP in May this year was frank. There has been, it said, “little change in total transport emissions”, that there has been a slight improvement in average emissions per vehicle while vehicle travel has increased, and that Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri is “not on track to achieve a 50 percent reduction by 2030”.
So the TERP is a damp squib. Worse, nobody I spoke to for this article holds much hope that it will be any more successful in the second half of its life. A very good question is, why?
It wasn’t for want of ambition. The TERP listed all sorts of measurable changes that would need to take place if it were to meet its 64 percent target. Cycling and micro-transport to account for 13 percent of all trips, up from less than one percent in 2019. Thirty-two percent of all light vehicles to be EVs. Vehicle kilometres travelled cut by half.
None of those metrics is on track. Not even close.
The simplest explanation for the failure of Auckland’s TERP is that it was ambition and ambition alone. It came with no budget, no delivery plan, no commitments from the council agencies that its success depended on. The council’s May update makes this clear: “The TERP was not tasked with considering issues such as affordability or any trade-offs that might be required with other strategic transport objectives.”
When the rubber met the road, you could say, there simply was no rubber.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see why. Just weeks after the TERP was launched in 2022 Auckland voted in a new and more conservative council. Early the next year the city was hit by the Auckland Anniversary Day floods, regarded at the time as our most expensive non-earthquake event ever and one that Mayor Wayne Brown estimated would ultimately cost the region $4 billion. And then in October that year New Zealand elected the current coalition government; it went on to gut funding for public transport and active modes and to cull the Clean Car Discount and other climate-positive initiatives.
The poor TERP, then, was ditched at the altar. But why even have a TERP without giving it the means to deliver? It’s here that local body politics comes into play.
The TERP describes itself as a pathway. A map, if you will, without any practical way of getting to the destination. It was launched with no budget and no step-by-step plan for delivery. Those things, crucially, rely on governance models that divide up decision-making. The council’s May TERP makes this clear, too: “…any implementation of TERP is dependent upon decisions taken through other processes such as the Long-Term Plan (LTP) and Regional Land Transport Plan (RLTP)”. Without statutory weight, the TERP binds neither of them.
The LTP, Auckland Council’s 10-year budget, is decided by its Governing Body – the mayor and all ward councillors – and you’ll remember that it lurched to the right after the 2022 council elections. The RLTP is rather more complicated. Prior to a restructure currently under way, it was written by Auckland Transport with input from the council, Waka Kotahi and KiwiRail. Transport advocates say AT’s senior leadership has in recent years been predictably conservative. Small wonder, they say, that the very body charged with implementing most of the changes that the TERP relied on has done little more than pay them lip service.
One such advocate is Heidi O’Callahan. “AT had responsibility for delivering TERP but it suffered from organisational conservatism,” she explains. “It’s hard not to read it as anything except a failure of governance.”
AT’s antediluvian disregard for the climate crisis didn’t exist in isolation, O’Callaghan reckons. The transport planning world in general is infected with a status-quo bias reflected in a “predict and provide” approach that, for example, relies on traffic forecasting models that don’t fairly account for induced demand.
Council-watchers such as O’Callaghan suspect that conservative councillors are maneuvering to scuttle the TERP once and for all. A case in point: Howick Ward councillor Maurice Williamson has made quite a play of asking AT and council staff for a TERP report on “realistic measures they can implement and their associated emissions targets and how they can be delivered and how they will be funded”.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that was setting the stage for a less ambitious TERP or putting the poor thing out of its misery altogether. If so, it would be no great surprise. Williamson, a former National Party minister, is no climate activist. He kicked off a recent op-ed in the Eastern Times by saying he was not a climate denier, and then promptly regurgitated a series of the most tired of denialist tropes: The earth’s climate has always changed. Carbon dioxide is a tiny proportion of the earth’s atmosphere. New Zealand’s emissions are a vanishingly small share of the global total. You get the idea.
So. We’ve got a transport emissions pathway that is going nowhere, a legacy of conservative leadership in the council body most responsible for cutting those emissions, and elected representatives like Williamson who are content to pay lip service to the climate crisis. It’s time to abandon all hope for the TERP, right?
Not so fast. The politics still matter, and you get the politics you vote for.
Former Waitematā and Gulf Ward councillor Pippa Coom says progressive climate policies come from progressive councils, and those are elected by…you. Only a third of eligible Aucklanders vote in council elections; when you do, your vote carries some weight.
There’s a useful inflection point in the governance of Auckland’s transport system just around the corner. In October, AT’s strategic functions will be taken over by the council. It’s an excellent time to write to the mayor, the chief executive and your own councillor to let them know that you care about the climate crisis and want the council to get real about it.
And consultation. Yes, people sometimes roll their eyes when it’s mentioned, but O’Callaghan says consultations on transport measures do matter. She points to the inner-west cycleways and street enhancements, rolled out in the face of determined resistance from councillors like Mike Lee. That, she says, was due in no small part to a tidal wave of support for the enhancements unearthed by public consultations.
O’Callaghan says submitting on consultations is an easy, here-and-now way to bolster support for the TERP. There will be an opportunity next year to support the TERP when submissions open for the council’s 2027 – 2037 Long Term Plan. And next time Auckland CouncilT consults on a transport initiative that matters to you, write in and let Auckland CouncilT know that our climate is important and that transport emissions need to be front and centre in that initiative and all others. If the initiative supports the TERP, that’s in its favour. If it doesn’t, it’s time to think again.
