A world-first legal challenge in Wellington is targeting the decades-long reliance of successive New Zealand governments on planting trees to offset climate-warming emissions from burning fossil fuels.
The judicial review filed on Tuesday by advocacy groups Lawyers for Climate Action and the Environmental Law Initiative has a broad focus, arguing the current Government has erred in how it revised its predecessor’s climate plan and how it assembled its own. But one of the specific claims the lawyers make in their filing targets the policy consensus on trees, highlighting that scientific research increasingly suggests carbon sequestered by trees should not offset carbon emitted to the atmosphere.
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