Six principles for economic recovery
Our advice to the Government on how to put a climate lens on Aotearoa's economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
What we plan for and build now is what we have in future.
We have reached the point where climate change needs to be our focus for future investments.
If we lose sight of climate change during this time, we may end up compounding today’s crisis with a future one.
We provided our six principles to government to help deliver an economic recovery that keeps Aotearoa on track to achieve our climate goals and ensure a climate lens is applied to the investment decisions that underpin our economic recovery.
Our six principles are:
- consider how stimulus investments can deliver long-term climate benefits
- bring forward transformational climate change investments that need to happen anyway
- prepare our workforce for the jobs of tomorrow
- work in partnership
- maintain incentives to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change
- change how we measure the success of economic recovery.
We believe that investing smartly while we have the opportunity will ensure people are better off now and into the future. If we don't put climate change in the center of decision making, we risk increasing emissions. Locking in high emissions infrastructure or infrastructure that is exposed to sea level rise, storms and other physical impacts of climate change will cost us more in the long run.
You can read our letter to Minister for Climate Change James Shaw here, which sets out our six principles in more detail.