Policy Quarterly – Volume 12, Issue 2 – May 2016 – Page 3 Ian Bailey and Tor Håkon Jackson Inderberg New Zealand and Climate Change what are the stakes and what can Introduction Following the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 2015, governments around the world now face the task of developing strategies to meet their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – UN terminology for emissions reduction goals to 2030 – and their broader contributions to the Paris Agreement’s goal of maintaining global average temperatures to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC, 2015a, article 2.1(a)). Paris represented a crucial starting point, but the decisions by Paula Bennett, New Zealand’s new minister for climate change issues, and her international counterparts will determine whether COP21 produced just warm words or genuinely charted a course to avoid the worst impacts of human-induced climate change. Ian Bailey is Professor of Environmental Politics at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom: ibailey@plymouth.ac.uk Tor Håkon Jackson Inderberg is Director of the European Programme and Senior Research Fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Lysaker, Norway: thin@fni.no New Zealand do? New Zealand’s climate mitigation policies have received sustained criticism for lacking ambition and for failing to provide credible incentives to reduce emissions (Bertram and Terry, 2010; Richter and Chambers, 2014). When the government ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 it pledged to return New Zealand’s emissions to 1990 levels by 2008–12. This was achieved, but mainly through forest sinks allowed under Kyoto accounting rules and purchasing overseas credits rather than through sustained decarbonisation of its economy. Excluding land use, land-use change and forestry, New Zealand’s emissions rose by 19% over the period, although it retains