New Zealand’s new government – and especially Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – takes climate change very seriously. But the long-term success of this government’s climate policies will still require a broad-based public support, and in particular a continued decline of the climate denialism that has impeded action in the past.

On 8th of November 2016 the World Meteorological Organization first demonstrated that global temperatures surpassed 1°C above earth’s pre-industrial average for an entire year. Believer in climate change or not, the scale of the job in front of our policy-makers is unprecedented. The good news for New Zealand is that,

Environmental problems started to generate widespread concern from the 1960s. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, is often credited with kicking off the modern environmental movement. The book described the effects of the use of human-made chemicals, notably DDT, on wildlife. Ingested by birds, the chemicals caused a thinning

The outcome of the COP21 climate talks in Paris last December was important and encouraging. It was the 21st annual United Nations meeting to discuss climate change and agree on what countries will do to avert the worst. A great deal of work went into preparing this meeting, as did

We [unions] have to stop running away from the climate crisis, stop leaving it to the environmentalist, and look at it. Let ourselves absorb the fact that the industrial revolution that led to our society’s prosperity is now destabilizing the natural systems on which all of life depends – Naomi

We used to detonate atomic bombs among the Pacific peoples – now we drop weather bombs. Vanuatu lies in ruins. Aid workers arriving in Port Vila have already described the death toll and damage as catastrophic, and Vanuatu’s lands minister, Ralph Regenvanu, expects that much of the population – 266,000