New Zealand's commitments on greenhouse gas reduction are beginning to look a bit thin.
In December this year countries subscribing to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will meet in Paris to encourage each other to do more to limit climate change.
The main aim is to reduce and eventually cease emissions of the greenhouse gases that are driving a steady increase in average global temperatures.
The hope must be to keep warming within the 2degC increase over pre-industrial levels, beyond which science tells us to expect an increasing risk of uncontrollable temperature rise and radical changes to global climate.
In preparation for Paris, each country is to prepare so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) telling the rest of the world what level of reduction in emissions it plans to make by 2020.
The idea is that these ''bottom up'' contributions will be totted up to see what the combined total implies for the planet as a whole and a ''top down'' assessment made of whether intended contributions will be enough to keep within the 2degC target.
So far just six INDCs have been announced: Switzerland, the European Union, Norway, Mexico, the US and Russia.
New Zealand must submit its offer within the next few months.
The Climate Action Tracker (Cat) website is giving updated progress reports on these national contributions and, for countries still to submit, estimating what the contribution would look like, based on current policies.
The analyses are done by four leading climate research institutes based in Germany.
If the current trend in emissions is sustained, Cat estimates that global mean temperatures are likely to rise by nearly 4degC (plus or minus a degree), a level that we must hope frightens the policy mandarins gathering in Paris as much as it should frighten us.
Based on the INDCs so far submitted, and Cat's estimates of contributions from other countries that have yet to submit, the Cat modellers suggest that the increase in global temperatures would be scaled back to about 3degC - possibly as low as 2.5degC, but possibly also as high as 3.8degC.
So the story so far is that the global community is not doing enough to keep us - and many generations to follow - clear of the risks of irreversible climate change.
A great benefit of the UNFCCC Paris meeting, and of the Cat research, is that it will allow us to compare the contributions of each country relative to the others.
We might hope that this will help shame laggards into doing more.
So how does New Zealand look so far? New Zealand's current target is to reduce emissions by 5% by 2020 relative to 1990 levels.
At the Copenhagen meeting in 2009, New Zealand also said it would expand that target to a 10%-20% reduction if there was sufficient evidence that the rest of the world was adopting policies capable of keeping warming within 2degC, a kind of ''I will if you will'' stance that is not unreasonable when facing a problem that requires collective action.
Is our current 5% reduction target enough? How does it compare with other countries?
A recent Ministry for the Environment report says that, as of 2013, our emissions have actually increased by more than 20% since 1990.
(The Minister for Climate Change, Tim Groser, was eager to point out that gross emissions actually fell in the 2013 year, giving some hope that progress is being made. However, changes in land use that absorb carbon also fell so that there was no net reduction in 2013).
The Cat researchers estimate that on current policy settings New Zealand's emissions will increase by 32% by 2020.
The inadequacy of our progress against the 5% target has been forcefully pointed out to us by other countries, including China and the European Union, in a review conducted by the UNFCCC late last year.
Our global partners, it seems are less than impressed.
And even if we do manage to reduce emissions by the 5% that we have promised, the Cat researchers tell us that, if this level of reductions became the global norm, warming would probably exceed 3-4degC.
The New Zealand 5% target is rated inadequate, along with those of big carbon-producing countries, such as Canada and Australia.
The world's biggest emitters, the US and China, are rated ahead of us, although their policies are still likely to breach the 2degC limit.
The Government's policy is to be a ''fast follower'' on climate change policy.
As of now, New Zealand is clearly a laggard in the effort to control emissions, and is seen as such by some of the major global powers.
The New Zealand INDC to be prepared over the next few months will show us just how quickly we intend to catch up.
• Colin Campbell-Hunt is an emeritus professor in the University of Otago Business School.
Each week in this column, one of a panel of writers addresses issues of sustainability.
Due to a subediting error, a figure in Prof Gerry Carrington's column last week was incorrect. It should have read that the cost of domestic electricity at the time was 3.5c/kWh.
