The provision of industrial free allocation can be one of the most technically challenging and politically fraught elements of designing an emissions trading system (ETS). In the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS), the primary rationales for industrial free allocation have been to...

The public and private sectors face important strategic decisions about low-emissions transitional pathways. Such decisions require sound evidence, with input from experts and stakeholders across the board. Models can be used for evidence-based decision-making, but New Zealand has shortcomings...

New Zealand is facing a challenging low-emission transition, and effective emission pricing needs to be part of the solution. In its pure form, an emissions trading system (ETS) fixes the quantity of emissions in regulated sectors and the market sets the emission price. In New Zealand's current...

Purchasing international emission reductions (IERs) can help New Zealand make a more ambitious and cost-effective contribution toward global climate change mitigation and support developing countries in accelerating their low-emission transition. However, New Zealand must avoid past mistakes by...

The fundamental purpose of an emissions trading system (ETS) is to constrain emissions and enable the market to set an emissions price path that facilitates an effective transition to a low-emissions economy. In a conventional ETS, the emissions constraint is defined by a cap (a fixed limit) on...

As New Zealand charts its course toward a low-emissions economy, the quality of energy-sector and multi-sector modelling is becoming increasingly important. This paper outlines why models are useful for answering complex questions, provides a stocktake of energy-sector and multi-sector models...

New Zealand faces the challenge of using our land in ways that are not only resilient to future pressures and sustain our rural communities but also enhance our natural environment. For the public and private sectors to make robust land-use decisions under uncertainty, high-quality modelling...