The Emissions Reduction Plan 2 (ERP2) delineates Aotearoa New Zealand’s strategy to attain its emissions reduction objectives for the 2026-2030 period, alongside setting a path towards achieving long-term emissions reduction objectives. ERP2 aims to reduce annual average emissions from 72.5 MtCO2e to 61 MtCO2e. The Ministry for the Environment (MfE) engaged Principal Economics Limited, the Centre of Policy Studies, and Infometrics Limited to evaluate the comprehensive impact of the proposed policies. This includes:

• Assessing the comprehensive economic repercussions of emissions mitigation policy packages within ERP2.

• Estimating and understanding of secondary or indirect consequences.

• Carrying out distributional analysis of these ramifications.

The critical policies investigated in our report include:

• Increasing renewable energy through Electrify NZ

• Targeting 10,000 public EV chargers

• Lowering agricultural emissions

• Investing in resource recovery

• Improving public transport

• Investigating carbon capture, utilisation and storage.

Cite this article

Torshizian E, Adams P, Stroombergen A. 2024. Economic Impact of New Zealand’s Second Emissions Reduction Plan. Report to Ministry for the Environment by Principal Economics Limited in collaboration with the Centre for Policy Studies and Infometrics Limited.

Aotearoa New Zealand suffers from an infrastructure deficit. Without the key infrastructure needed now for our economy to thrive, we deprive future generations from significant economic prosperity. While transformational infrastructure projects necessitate time to be developed into sound technical solutions to our needs, many New Zealand projects are further delayed by policy decision and financing constraints.
In this novel application of the infrastructure Wider Economic Benefits approach, we quantify the cost to society of these further delays for the first time, by using the example of the Waikato Expressway. We used our subregional CGE model to estimate the downstream benefits of the Expressway. At a high-level, results of our analysis quantify the annual benefits of having the Waikato Expressway in the economy. Without the expressway in function as early as possible, $334 million of economic benefits were forgone each year.

Cite this article

Principal Economics. (2022). Great decisions are timely: Benefits from more efficient
infrastructure investment decision-making. Report to Infrastructure New Zealand.

The Ministry for the Environment (MfE) appointed Principal Economics to review the Housing and Business Development Capacity Assessments HBAs). Our review included all councils’ HBAs, except for Rotorua and Wellington, which were not available at the time of this review. The focus of our review was on the requirements of the National Policy Statement on Urban Development 2020 (NPS-UD 2020). The outcome of our review indicates the areas of improvement for the next round of HBAs both for the councils and for the MfE and HUD (the ministries).

Reviews that have been published online can be found below:

• Dunedin – Otago Regional Council and Dunedin City Council.
• Futureproof – Waikato Regional Council, Hamilton City Council, Waikato District Council and Waipa District Council.
• Tasman – Tasman District Council.