At 6 am this morning climate activists laid siege to Fonterra’s head office in Auckland’s CBD, calling it a climate crime scene. This action to shut down a major polluter is being taken because of inadequate action on the climate crisis by successive governments.

Extinction Rebellion Tāmaki Makaurau spokesperson, Caril Cowan, said, “We targeted Fonterra because, for the second year running, it is New Zealand’s worst corporate climate polluter. In the light of climate-related floods, slips, droughts and coastal erosion increasingly impacting New Zealanders, including many losing their homes, and some recently their lives.”

This is especially pertinent with the national state of emergency required because of climate crisis enhanced rainfall in both the January floods in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland and Cyclone Gabrielle. Such storms and floods are occuring around the world. As are unprecidented but expected droughts and fires.

As successive Governments have allowed Fonterra to be an unacceptable polluter, Extinction Rebellion Tamaki Makaurau will keep the siege in place until Fonterra agrees:

a) to follow the science and set much more ambitious goals and specific targets to reduce its on-farm emissions

b) to stop burning coal, the worst polluting fossil fuel, and transition urgently to wood wastage or biomass at all its dry milk plants

c) to stop getting legislation for their farms that absents them from offsetting omissions and

d) to drastically reduce the herd and actively encourage the transition to efficient regenerative farming.

“In this election year,” Caril Cowan says, “voters can take the opportunity to hold our politicians to account and urge them to stand up and declare what policies they are prepared to enact to reign in Fonterra and support it to reduce its on-farm and industrial emissions.”

To honour the Paris agreement of post industrial temperature rise of 1.5 or less than 2 degrees, urgent action is needed now. We are currently on track for a devastating 2.3 degrees by the end of the century..

ENDS

For more information contact:

Caril Cowan
Spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion Tamaki Makaurau
0211883933
Caril.cowan@protonmail.com

Further Information

1) Aside from its huge agricultural emissions, its coal burning emissions alone create approximately $370 million of damage to NZ and the planet per annum, based on a recent U.S. Environmental Agency estimate of the cost of burning coal.

2) NIWA estimates that over Auckland one degree of warming translates to about a 20% increase in the one hour rainfall, for a one-in-50-year-event.

Life on Paptuanuku, Earth, is in crisis. We have entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown, and we are in the midst of a mass extinction of our own making. The governments of the world have failed to protect us. To survive, it's going to take everything we've got.

Extinction Rebellion is a global environmental movement with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel governments into action to minimize the climate crisis, thus minising biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse.

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