Lies and NZ Statistics

9 June 2011

Delegates will be fascinated to discover that New Zealand won’t release its forestry emission and removal projections to NZ NGOs so that it can “avoid prejudice to the substantial economic interests of NZ,” and “enable the Minister to carry on without prejudice, or disadvantage, negotiations.”

This raises the question of what forestry projections has New Zealand been providing to Parties in the UNFCCC negotiations these past couple of years? Perhaps New Zealand’s Minister of Climate Change Negotiations hides the real figures in his briefcase while his officials hand out merry works of fiction to fellow delegates.  ECO encourages readers to enquire for clear information from the NZ delegation on its LULUCF assumptions (and while you’re at it, you might want to ask about the substantive amounts of offsetting that is core to New Zealand’s positioning).