Commission chairman Dr Rod Carr made the warning by video to farmers at a forum on how they can ease climate change, hosted by the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural & Horticultural Science at Lincoln University.
Farmers in the audience were still dazed by the Government’s agricultural emissions proposal last month veering away from recommendations by the He Waka Eke Noa (HWEN) partnership.
Their gripe includes carrying the can for paying for New Zealand emissions, price being used instead of incentives for change and farm vegetation failing to be recognised as absorbing emissions.
Dr Carr said research showed there had been 29 climate-related disasters so far this year costing more than $US1 billion.
"We are out of time. The science is pretty clear that the chances of sustaining 1.5deg warming from pre-industrial levels by the middle of this century is a closing window if it hasn’t already closed."
He said the science told us that global emissions must peak by 2025 and reduce by 50% by 2030 if we were to achieve the 1.5deg warming target — and that almost seemed "implausible".
Greenhouse gases were one of the greatest threats to food production, some of which came from biogenic methane particularly in the production of meat and dairy, he said.
"If the time for action is now and the globe has run out of time then it won’t be long before the reality sinks in that one of the fastest ways of limiting the impact from global food production from greenhouse gases and warming is to reduce biogenic methane production from many sources."
He said the challenge for New Zealand was to get ahead of that curve and quickly deploy low-emitting forms of protein production.
The Danes had signed up to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors, including agriculture, by 2030.
"They are our competitors and those are the competitive threats we face if we are laggards in deploying new technologies for lower emitting production of edible protein we will vote ourselves off any agenda."
He said investment in research was needed alongside explaining the urgency to farmers of changing practices involving breeding and feeding now.
Lost progress now needed to be made up, he said.
He said farmers faced the same disruption as the removal of farm subsidies in the 1980s if emission changes were not made.
"If we under-rice our emissions and overprice and rely on sequestration we set ourselves up for the same calamitous adjustment by the end of this decade."
Dr Carr said the agriculture sector wanted to be rewarded for adopting lower emitting farm practices and land use.
However, the HWEN proposal and now the Government’s proposal up for consultation had a low and unlikely to be effective price on emissions and relied heavily on rewarding good behaviours with grants for those practices.
He said the commission’s role in the Government’s plan had been narrow in scope — to assess the agriculture sector’s readiness to face an emissions price.
Much of HWEN’s findings matched the commission — that putting 23,000 farms in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was impractical by 2025, ineffective with meeting targets and farm-level pricing was likely to be most effective than at processor-level.
The commission differed to HWEN in the "thorny" question of sequestration of on-farm vegetation, he said.
Mr Carr said establishing a separate and parallel system outside of the ETS for recognising vegetation for sequestration properties would create an expensive and inequitable way of providing financial assistance for farmers to meet obligations to pay for largely agricultural non-carbon dioxide emissions.
The split gas target is to reduce bio-genic methane emissions by 10% by 2030, towards 24%-47% reduction by 2050.
He said a pollute and plant system of fast sequestering pine trees to meet these targets could lead to ongoing plantings which would likely be socially and economically undesirable and a high-risk strategy for reducing emissions.
TIM.CRONSHAW@alliedpress.co.nz
