Submission to Carbon Zero draft Discussion Paper
Date: 21 April 2023
The ambitious Carbon Zero by 2030 goal of Queenstown Lakes Regenerative Tourism Plan excited national headlines. But the devil is always in the detail.
The challenge of assessing visitor flight emissions is central, as the Destination Management Plan undertook to include the emissions of visitors’ travel to the district.
Developing appropriate metrics is fundamental to monitoring the DMP’s performance against this goal, so a Discussion Paper was to outline a baseline and process for counting the greenhouse gas emissions of the district’s tourism sector.
In its first draft, the Discussion Paper identified three methodologies for measuring these flight emissions, two based on FlightPlan2050’s work published in our International Visitor Flight Emissions report.
After identifying three methodologies, the draft Discussion Paper did not equally outline each. Instead, it focused on the one least appropriate that included only the flight emissions of international visitors one-way flight for the first sector, being to Australia, when most international visitors come from further afield using multisector flights.
In this submission, we challenged Destination Think, the report authors, to represent each methodology equally. We are pleased they accepted the challenge and made the appropriate changes, which can be seen when comparing the draft with the final Discussion Paper.