BACKGROUND
In January 2025, due to deep concern at the systemic shortcomings of climate policies of successive governments, the Nelson Tasman Climate Forum and 32 climate experts and other specialists wrote to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts.
The letter strongly referenced the authoritative “The 2024 State of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth” (Oxford University Press) and highlighted the grave warnings contained in that report. ( 2024 state of the climate report).
The ensuing correspondence was so lopsided as to be bizarre, with an exchange characterised by the forum consistently stressing the escalating level of alarm raised by the report, and the responses from the ministers consistently ignoring the deeply concerning matters that had been raised.
We feel that the public of New Zealand (and beyond) deserve to be able to see for themselves what in essence amounts to a tacit refusal to engage with facts of truly colossal importance to our country and the world.
To that end we are posting the correspondence below.
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE NELSON TASMAN CLIMATE FORUM
AND PRIME MINISTER LUXON AND CLIMATE CHANGE MINISTER WATTS
Correspondence timeline to 10th March.
The copies of actual correspondence further below are in reverse date order (newest first)
16th January NT Climate Forum (per JSB/LW) to Prime Minister cc S Watts
23rd January pro forma hard copy reply from PM’s office. (not included below)
1st February follow up email to PM’s office CC SW
18th Feb follow up email to PM cc SW
19th Feb Email from PM’s office “As the PM, Christopher relies on his colleagues…” i.e. SW
20th Feb letter from Minister Watts to NTCF (received 3rd March). Note date stamp preceded ours of 23rd Feb but was received a week after it.
23rd Feb Emailed letter to SW as follow up to latest PM’s correspondence
23rd Feb Emailed letter to PM as follow up to his office’s latest correspondence
24th Feb Email from PM’s office in reply
7th March email letter in response to Minister Watts [note strange sequence of 20/2, 23/2, 7/3]
As at 29 March this was the last communication directly with the PM or Minister Watts. On 23rd March an email was sent to all MPs alerting them to the deeply concerning outcome.
Email letter sent 7th March to SW
Dear Minister Watts,
Thank you for your letter of 20th February in response to ours of 16th January to the Prime Minister. Thank you also for outlining the approach the Government is taking in the climate arena, and the legislative context to that approach.
We are writing to impress on you the widening and seemingly unacknowledged gap between our country’s current climate strategies and those commensurate with the desperately challenging and escalating circumstances that are expected to lie ahead.
We are, of course, pleased that the Government is committed to taking action on climate change. We notice, however, that you do not refer to the matters we raised with the Prime Minister and, in particular, to the ominous and consequential “2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth” (at https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/74/12/812/7808595 ) .
This is especially concerning because the report specifically seeks to alert policymakers to intensifying and increasingly unpredictable threats to life as we know it (including, of course, to the people and environment of New Zealand). Written by globally-recognised authorities, it commands respect and deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness.
It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that the Government strategies referenced in the last paragraph of your letter bear little relationship to those commensurate with reacting to the threats described in the report. It may well be that the report reached the public domain too late to have direct influence on the documents to which you referred. Additionally it may be that it takes some time for normal policy procedures to catch up.
However we cannot overemphasise that the dire circumstances detailed in the report merit urgent and responsive strategies. These must not be allowed to be constrained by “normal” policy processes, and deserve to be treated as an emergency in the fullest sense of the term.
Additionally, we wish to ensure that you are aware of the January 2025 report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (with the University of Exeter), concerning climate change and other impacts. It opens “The risk of Planetary Insolvency looms unless we act decisively. Without immediate policy action to change course, catastrophic or extreme impacts are eminently plausible, which could threaten future prosperity.”
As well as being cause for further general alarm, this would seem to have particular bearing on your reference to “driving economic growth.” (The report can be found at https://actuaries.org.uk/news-and-media-releases/news-articles/2025/jan/16-jan-25-planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature/. )
You will appreciate why we continue to pursue this with urgency and remain most interested to learn how you see the matter as best proceeding. We also remain open to trying to assist in this.
Yours sincerely,
Joanna Santa Barbara and Lindsay Wood.
Email 24th Feb from PMs office
Mōrena Joanna and Lindsay,
Thank you for your follow up email to the Prime Minister, Rt Hon Christopher Luxon.
Christopher certainly does care about climate change and expects his Minister for Climate Change, Hon Simon Watts, as well as the climate change team, to raise urgent/important matters with the Prime Minister’s team.
Your concerns have been noted by the Prime Minister’s office and is under consideration.
Thank you once again for taking the time to write; it is appreciated.
Ngā mihi nui
Sonya Ford
Correspondence Lead Advisor | Office of Rt Hon Christopher Luxon
Prime Minister
Minister for National Security and Intelligence
Minister Responsible for Ministerial Services
Private Bag 18041, Parliament Buildings, Wellington 6160, New Zealand
Letter of 20th February from Minister Watts received 3rd March
Note it is framed as replying to the forum’s letter of 16th January to the PM and and not the letter to SW of 23rd Feburary.
Email 23 Feb to the PM regarding the transfer of comms to Simon Watts.
Dear Prime Minister,
Thank you for your Correspondence Lead Advisor’s response to my email of 18th February. As a result we have followed up with Minister Watts as per the email copied below.
However, without wishing to appear presumptuous, we are rather taken aback at your own seeming lack of response at any level to the momentous issues raised in our correspondence. We drew to your attention circumstances of colossal, catastrophic, and urgent significance as reported by a global team of experts with impeccable pedigrees in climate. However, we read the latest response from your office as suggesting that you see no place for your giving consideration to them unless Minister Watts so recommends.
In the hope that you might elect to become more involved, we suggest to you that such a level of detachment has to a degree characterised the past political responses that first spurred us to write to you on the potential need for a future government apology. We thus again urge you to play a more active leadership role in a matter of such extreme and grave national and global consequence.
Yours respectfully,
Joanna Santa Barbara and Lindsay Wood
Email letter sent to Minister Watts 23rd Feb along with the State of the climate report and our summary of same. Apart from cc of the PM’s letters, this instigated our dealings with SW after the PM had passed it over to him. However his letter to us, dated 20th Feb but received 3rd March is framed as a reply to our letter to the PM and not as a reply to this letter of 23rd Feb.
Dear Minister Watts,
I expect you will have seen the Prime Minister’s recent response to my email earlier this week and so will be unsurprised at my now writing to you.
I also expect you will be unsurprised that the specialist group I represent feels compelled to sound such a clarion call for urgent action on the momentous matters we raised with the Prime Minister. To assist you in making that connection I attach further copies of “The 2024 State of the Climate Report” and of our precis of it, both of which accompanied our original hard copy letter that went to the Prime Minister (plus a copy to you) on the 16th January.
As noted to Mr Luxon, we have not yet pursued this matter through other channels. In that regard, and given how enormous and pressing are the issues, I ask you in turn to respond at your earliest convenience with an indication of how you see this as best proceeding.
Naturally, our group is very willing to be involved in ways that might assist serious and urgent engagement with this portentous matter.
Yours sincerely,
Joanna Santa Barbara and Lindsay Wood.
Follow up email of 17th Feb sent to PM and cc SW
Dear Prime Minister,
We are writing to follow up our letter of 16th January, and subsequent communication with your office, regarding New Zealand’s long history of governmental shortcomings in responding to the climate crisis.
We doubt we need to impress further on you the monumental scale of the issues or the imperative to tackle them with urgency. However, both of those unwelcome dimensions have recently been highlighted by the horrific Los Angeles fires occurring in what proved to be the hottest month on record.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of you, as head of our country, showing the exemplary leadership demanded by the escalating gravity and urgency of climate change. The information accompanying our letter of January 16th should allay any misgivings that might be put to you in that regard.
Your parliamentary colleagues and the public at large must be left in no doubt as to the pressing need for transformative action at all levels, and for such action to be founded on truly well-informed, long-term thinking. We see the elevation of Minister Watts to cabinet as helping pave the way for such a response.
We in the Nelson Tasman Climate Forum, together with the very many highly qualified signatories of our earlier letter, attach immense importance to national leadership in what we see as the highest priority issue we are facing as a nation. We respectfully reiterate a strand of our earlier letter that this situation presents you with a singular opportunity to stand above your predecessors, take a decisive course commensurate with the severity of the issues, and so also avert the prospect of a future government apology in the climate arena.
To date we have not pursued this matter through other channels, but the issues are too enormous and too pressing to be let lie for long. We thus ask that you respond at your earliest convenience with an indication of how you see this as best proceeding.
Yours sincerely,
Joanna Santa Barbara and Lindsay Wood.
Email to the PM’s office in response to their pro forma reply
February 1st, 2025.
Mr/Ms S. Ford,
Lead Advisor,
Office of the Prime Minister.
Dear Mr/Ms Ford,
Thank you for your letter of 23rd January advising of the high volume of communication the Prime Minister is dealing with, and that you have forwarded our letter of 16th January for his consideration.
We are very mindful that the Prime Minster must attend to many pressing matters, and would not have troubled to write to him in such a vein, nor with the added weight of substantial specialist endorsement, had the matter not been hugely urgent and of potentially catastrophic significance.
We thus ask that you ensure that, at the first opportunity, the Prime Minster is made aware of the portentous nature of the matter that we seek to draw to his attention.
Please note that we sent a letter, a list of 34 qualified endorsers, a scientific paper and a summary of that paper by mail on Jan.16th. If you require copies of any of this material, we will be happy to supply them.
Sincerely,
Joanna Santa Barbara, MB.BS, FRANZCP, FRCP(C), O.Ont..
Joanna Santa Barbara,
Co-Chair Nelson Tasman Climate Forum.
‘Phone 022 459 0650
Hard copy letter to the PM 16th January
Nelson Tasman Climate Forum
58C Mytton Heights,
RD1,
MOTUEKA 7196 Telephone 022 459 0650
The Right Honourable Christopher Luxon, CC. The Right Honourable Simon Watts,
16th January 2025
Dear Prime Minister,
Re: Averting the need for a future government apology.
The Nelson Tasman Climate Forum, together with the undersigned specialists, is writing with deep concern to urge you to take a cue from your own apology to the victims of abuse in care and break an ominous cycle in a different but crucial arena.
Over the years various governments have apologised on behalf of the Crown for wrongs committed in the name of the government. As well as the very recent apology for Abuse in State Care, we can think of apologies to several iwi, to Erebus Disaster victims, to the Samoan community, and more.
While formally apologising is the correct thing to do in such circumstances, each nonetheless represents a situation that would be far better had it been properly addressed in the first instance. It variously took years of dogged persistence by the aggrieved and their supporters, substantial formal inquiries, and political leadership, for each due, and usually long overdue, apology.
Reflecting on this tragic legacy we are struck by parallels, over many governments, with our nation’s responses to the unfolding climate emergency. For example, failure to heed dire warnings from those with knowledge, downplaying deeply troubling situations, and ignoring or delaying measures that would help safeguard the people of New Zealand from such an escalating threat.
Indeed some of the shortcomings are so inexplicable that we at times wonder what ominous details of the climate threat have failed to cross the desks of successive Prime Ministers.
The history of misery and misdeeds behind past apologies makes it hard to imagine a situation that could eclipse those affronts to humanity. However, without taking a fraction away from such past suffering, we put to you that the unfolding climate crisis is set to become just such a situation.
Indeed, one scholar assisting with this letter noted “The brute fact is that climate change will dwarf any of the episodes of human suffering that have been recorded in history.” In that vein we attach “The 2024 State of the Climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth” from Oxford University Press together with our summary of same. “Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled“ is one of many alarms sounded by the report to add to the “dire warnings” noted above.
With all of our hearts we urge you to pause and take most serious stock of the mismatch between the history and present state of Earth’s climate, and the history and present state of New Zealand’s climate responses. This applies both to climate mitigation and, increasingly, to climate adaptation.
We then request that you ask yourself whether this too must await a Royal Commission to bring its fraught reality to light. Such a commission would find a population that had been left largely in the dark by its governments, was needlessly imperilled by official intransigence, and had an economy struggling far more than would have been the case with robust, timely and well-informed strategies.
We have touched on a few parallels between historic apologies and shortcomings of successive responses to the climate emergency. They represent only a portion of myriad climate issues that deserve mention. For example, our water security is weak, most economic sectors are ill-prepared for what is coming, agriculture and forestry will suffer severely, and climate education falls badly short. Further, our ongoing pattern of urban development is ill-suited to the hothouse climate we are generating, and our approaches to energy and transport are destined to be found seriously wanting.
Among the sobering dimensions that would distinguish a climate-centred apology from historical ones is that the apology would be due to the entire population of the country, and to untold generations into the future.
As if that is not enough, there is now only a minimal, and almost extinguished, prospect of restoring the future to anything like we might have enjoyed had we acted sooner and with greater conviction.
A formal inquiry into our climate responses might or might not result in “16 devastating volumes,” as you described the Royal Commission’s report last year. However the findings would be devastating, nonetheless.
Among many tributes in your November apology, you applauded those “breaking that cycle that too often hangs like a curse over families.” We respectfully put to you that you now have a singular opportunity to break the cycle of enfeebled climate responses that, otherwise, looks set to hang like a curse over every one of our families for untold generations to come.
By decisive and visionary action to truly ready our economy and our communities for what is on the way, and to drive reductions in our emissions at scale and at speed, your government could help avert the imminent extinguishing of the future we are on the cusp of losing.
In so doing, that would also help avert the need for a future Crown apology for failures of preceding governments to adequately safeguard the people, the economy, and the environment in their care.
It need not, indeed must not, take even more lost time, more harm and suffering, greater sacrificing of our future, or a further Royal Commission, to get us to that point of realisation.
We implore you to make space in your schedule to take this request most seriously. We will, of course, be very pleased to meet with you or to respond to any queries you might raise.
Most respectfully,
Dr. Joanna Santa Barbara Lindsay Wood MNZM
Co-chair, Nelson Tasman Climate Forum Project lead, Nelson Tasman Climate Forum
Plus 32 others