07 November

A small group of people will be staging a protest outside Tākina, (Wakefield Street, Tuesday, November 7, at 6pm) to oppose Christchurch Airport’s nomination for the Kiwi Rail-sponsored Sustainability Award, and to urge New Zealanders to address the rapidly expanding climate impact of the passenger jet aviation sector.

Christchurch Airport is in the advanced stages of preparing for a submission for a new 24/7 international airport in Tarras, Central Otago. This airport would open the floodgates to mass tourism in the region, cause environmental damage, and contribute significantly to New Zealand's carbon emissions at a time when they need to be urgently reduced.

Plans for this airport also appear to conflict with the Tourism Industry Association's expressed ambition to be net zero before 2050. Regional tourism organisations, Lake Wānaka Tourism and Destination Queenstown, have expressed their opposition to the proposal, alongside local residents and groups made up of thousands of people from Central Otago and nationwide.

The judges of the tourism awards are on record as saying they “were particularly taken with tourism operators establishing their social licence.” Suze Keith, deputy chair of Sustainable Tarras, a group fighting the proposed airport, notes that “Christchurch Airport does not have the social licence to continue investing in this proposal, but this appears of no concern to them, instead they have to date invested well over $60 million in the project and continue to stonewall the local communities they will impact and concerned groups.” She says that “concerns have been raised by scientists, community groups, the media and industry commentators, yet the Christchurch Airport team leave those concerns unanswered.”

The criteria for the Sustainability Award are carbon reduction, restoring nature and eliminating waste. Ms Keith says, “If it wasn’t so serious, we’d be laughing at the irony of this nomination: a Sustainability Award, sponsored by Kiwi Rail, potentially going to an airport that is looking to bring in a minimum of 5 million more tourists each year by 2050, and by doing so doubling the emissions produced”.

“We’ve noticed that Christchurch Airport spends a lot of time and resources marketing itself as a highly sustainable business which has reduced nearly all its emissions. The problem is that this excludes the emissions from the flights in and out of the airport – which make up over 95% of the broader footprint. This is in the context of aviation as the fastest growing sector when it comes to emissions”.

The other criteria for the award, environmental restoration and waste elimination, have also enraged the members of Sustainable Tarras. Earlier this year, Christchurch Airport’s lawyers appeared at the hearings of the proposed Otago Regional Policy Statement, to argue for reduced environmental protections and to ease the consenting pathway for the proposed airport. To replicate airport infrastructure, particularly when other airports are currently under capacity, (including Christchurch Airport itself), is the opposite of waste elimination.

Sustainable Tarras Petition to Parliament: https://petitions.parliament.nz/a1e919f3-82d4-4056-9b36-7c330e2d2ff2

Sustainable Tarras website: https://sustainabletarras.com/

Fact sheet on Aotearoa New Zealand’s aviation emissions

· Air travel is responsible for 12% of our gross CO2 emissions

· We are ranked 6th in the world for aviation emissions, at 1 tonne CO2 per person – 10 times the world average

· There is no excise tax on jet fuel

· International flights are not subject to GST or the ETS and are not in the carbon budgets

· Domestic aviation emissions per person are 8 times higher than Germany and the UK

· Many of our airports are expanding to provide for continuous growth

· Technological solutions for zero-emission flight are speculative and far off

· Burning oil at high altitude is three times as damaging as burning it on the ground

· Most of the environmental damage from flying is caused by a small number of very frequent flyers

Reference: Paul Callister and Robert McLachlan, Managing New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions from aviation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2022.

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