Minister’s ‘fudged’ climate policy faces major High Court challenge
A landmark High Court hearing opens today as the Environmental Law Initiative (ELI) and Lawyers for Climate Action NZ challenge Climate Change Minister Simon Watts over decisions they say breach the law and endanger Aotearoa New Zealand’s climate goals.
“The purpose of our climate law is to ensure credible action that protects our future and supports the international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says LCANZ’s Executive Director, Jessica Palairet.
“However, Minister Watts’ decisions miss the mark. They mean Aotearoa New Zealand’s emissions will continue to be high for decades to come, offset by hundreds of thousands of hectares of pine trees. Our law requires more”.
ELI’s Senior Legal Researcher Eliza Prestidge-Oldfield says, “The Minister’s approach is setting New Zealand up to fail, with enormous costs being shunted onto future generations.”
“There is a strong public interest in reviewing the Government’s decisions to ensure they are lawful and fit for purpose”.
Under the Climate Change Response Act, the Government must put in place an ‘emissions reduction plan’. Each five-yearly plan enables our emissions budgets to be met, and is a stepping stone towards the achievement of net-zero emissions by 2050.
The case argues the Minister unlawfully weakened the first emissions reduction plan (ERP1) through a flawed, tick‑box consultation process that produced an amended plan ELI and Lawyers for Climate Action describe as “incoherent and internally contradictory.”
It also challenges the Minister’s approval of a second plan (ERP2), despite evidence that the chances of meeting New Zealand’s 2026–2030 emissions budget are “not much better than a coin toss,” and that the country is off‑track for its 2030 methane target.
“Our legal challenge is about bringing some honest scrutiny to the assumptions the Minister has made, which favour fossil fuel interests over genuine climate action,” says Prestidge-Oldfield.
A central issue in the case is the Government’s heavy reliance on pine monocultures to absorb carbon instead of reducing emissions at source by transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Forests sequester carbon only temporarily, are highly vulnerable to fire, pests, and storms, and in some cases are being proposed in areas with rare ecosystems.
Lawyers for Climate Action’s Jessica Palairet says “the Minister has treated forests absorbing carbon from the atmosphere as interchangeable with actually reducing emissions from their source, despite clear science showing they are not. The Minister also needed to consider whether our heavy reliance on tree planting was consistent with international law, which he did not.”
ELI and Lawyers for Climate Action say the Minister’s decisions benefit major polluters, at a time when New Zealand’s per‑capita emissions remain among the highest in the world.
The case comes in the wake of the 2025 International Court of Justice advisory opinion, which confirmed that developed countries like New Zealand must “take the lead” in cutting emissions and adopting measures capable of achieving its climate targets.
Courts in Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and South Korea have in recent years struck down weak or vague climate plans, often forcing governments to rewrite their climate policies. In the UK, the High Court has found on two separate occasions that the Government’s plans were unlawful, including because the plans were too risky and would not deliver the necessary emissions reductions.
ELI and Lawyers for Climate Action are asking the Court to declare the Minister’s decisions unlawful and to quash ERP2 so a credible, lawful plan can be prepared. Eliza Prestidge-Oldfield says: “New Zealand has a legal and moral obligation to do its fair share. We’re asking the Court to ensure the Government meets it.”
Further information:
The Climate Change Commission has found that the Government’s plan relies on planting around 800,000 hectares of additional exotic forests by 2070 — roughly twice the size of Auckland — rather than prioritising reductions in emissions at source, which is what the Commission recommends. See the Commission’s 2025 Monitoring Report, p 131.
After taking office, the Government discontinued 35 actions and projects in the first Emissions Reduction Plan, including scrapping the Clean Car Discount and cancelling the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry fund.
A February report from the University of Oxford found that states cannot rely on speculative, large‑scale carbon dioxide removal to compensate for insufficient near‑term emissions cuts.
See also a report from Zero Carbon Analytics published this week: Offsetting is no substitute for emissions cuts - Zero Carbon Analytics