Comment: The subject of climate change has been notably muted in this year’s election campaign. Reviewing the major parties’ policies demonstrates electoral politics is failing to generate adequate responses to the complexity and scale of the climate problem. The issue has become effectively ungovernable within current political institutions.
The coalition Government has already dismantled the country’s climate policy architecture that was needed for much to change.
NZ First wants to pull out of the Paris Agreement altogether, while Act says our commitment needs to be renegotiated or else we should withdraw.
Labour has resiled from pricing agricultural emissions, one of the country’s key sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
A recent Public Health Communication Centre survey of parties’ approaches to energy and climate concluded no party had put forward comprehensive policies for reducing fossil fuel dependence (although the Greens had the “most comprehensive policy”). What emerged was increasing polarisation and a failure almost across the board to articulate a meaningful response.
However, climate change has not politely disappeared from the election.
Something much stranger has happened: it has fractured and reappeared in pieces, each one a symptom of the central unresolved climate problem, whether it is the cost-of-living crisis, electricity prices, food and energy security, farming, infrastructure, or adaptation.
Adaptation inertia
The latter provides an excellent case in point. In July, the Government proposed an amendment to the Climate Change Response Act requiring councils to prepare climate adaptation plans for high-risk areas. But it failed to specify how these plans might be funded, saying this was a question it would address after the election.
In its August 2026 assessment, the Climate Change Commission pointed out that adaptation is falling behind escalating risks, that action has been “patchy” and in some cases, slipped backwards, and that – most importantly – little progress has been made on deciding how to pay for adaptation.
Answers to the difficult political questions – who pays, which places are protected and which are not, who wins and who loses – always seem to lie just beyond the next election horizon. The state has become very good at announcing goals, while the architecture of action proves to be thin, incomplete, or incapable of delivering.
This is sometimes referred to as ‘policy incoherency’.
But it is not simply a case of inaction; it is a sign these problems are becoming too complex for our current institutions to govern effectively. Instead, we get threadbare narratives, such as the one told by the current Government that we are on track to meet our Paris Agreement targets.
These narratives have the unfortunate habit of circling around to kick us from behind.
A Dutch environment group called Both ENDS has just lodged a complaint under the EU-NZ free-trade agreement claiming that New Zealand has, in its pursuit of economic advantage, breached its commitments to not weaken environmental protections and to effectively implement the Paris Agreement.
These clauses were included in the free-trade deal in an attempt to prevent signatories from embarking on a regulatory ‘race to the bottom’ on the environment. However, the coalition Government appears to have read this as a challenge.
Its claim of being committed to the Paris Agreement has become increasingly detached from the reality of its actions and from the visible trajectory of consequences. The stakes are not trivial: last year, EU-NZ two-way trade was about $21.5 billion.
You can make uncomfortable realities disappear from an election campaign. You can’t make them disappear from international agreements and commitments.
The international parallel
Aotearoa is not the only place where political narratives are struggling to keep pace with reality.
In September, the United Nations Environment Programme released a report confirming that surpassing 1.5C of warming is now unavoidable. Yet it retains the possibility of an ‘overshoot and return’ best case pathway in which temperatures peak at about 1.8C before returning to 1.5C.
While this pathway can be technically modelled, bringing it to fruition is anything but straightforward. The report itself reveals the layering of optimistic, at-times heroic, assumptions required to engineer a return to 1.5C, alongside a lack of full engagement with the trade-offs that global society would face in the attempt.
The problem faced by the United Nations is how to tell the truth about a rapidly deteriorating situation without undermining the cooperation needed to address it. Any attempt to renegotiate the Paris Agreement risks geopolitical fragmentation and failure. Where experimentation and innovation are needed, we substitute threadbare narratives that delay institutional adaptation.
This is the same governability dilemma we see here at home, but in a different institutional setting.
Is climate change too big to leave to politicians?
Our political machinery is systematically incentivised to simplify problems that actually require deliberation.
Climate change is precisely the kind of problem that needs a different approach – one that provides time to understand the evidence, exposure to competing interests, deliberation over trade-offs, and the ability to reach conclusions that aren’t dictated by the immediate electoral cycle or derailed by the power of elite vested interests.
We now have good knowledge about how to construct democratic processes, such as citizens’ assemblies, that allow people to work through complex questions, while giving these processes a meaningful place in decision-making.
A recent comparative study of citizens’ assemblies in Ireland and France found the crucial issue is how these deliberative processes are connected to parliamentary processes. Where Ireland’s more formal integration provided stronger institutional coupling, France’s looser model, characterised by high-stakes presidential promises, lacked robust follow through.
Another approach using Polis (an opensource platform developed by The Computational Democracy Project) can help citizens uncover areas of consensus, providing information for the formation of citizens’ assembly topics.
On the Polis platform, participants can vote on statements and contribute their own statement for others to consider. The Reality of Everything project, with which I’m involved, recently launched a Polycrisis Polis.
What politics suppresses does not disappear. It moves to a new forum. The lesson from climate change in this election may be that some decisions are simply too complex, too long-term, and too consequential to leave to electoral politics alone.
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