The High Court has ruled Waka Kotahi has no legal obligation to quantify what effect its road building will have on emissions. File photo Photo: Supplied / Waka Kotahi
A court challenge to force Waka Kotahi to take climate change into account more has failed.
The High Court has ruled the transport agency has no legal obligation to quantify what effect its road building will have on emissions.
It is a knockback for the lobby group Movement that was seeking a judicial review.
It comes in the same week the government indicated transport's top priority would shift away from reducing emissions, and towards fixing flood damage and making roads and bridges more resilient after Cyclone Gabrielle.
The lobbyists had argued that while Waka Kotahi makes out that emissions are a mandatory consideration, it does not have to quantify that and is not bound to reduce them.
But the court ruling said that was okay.
"Waka Kotahi had no legal or other obligation to put in place quantitative measures for emissions" in its national transport planning, it said.
The agency had to balance four strategic priorities set out by the government, and climate change was only one of them.
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The other three were safety, better travel options and improving freight connections - "none of those takes primacy over the other", the court said.
The latest national plan, called the NLTP for 2021-24, met the requirements of the Government Policy Statement (GPS), the guiding light on transport planning.
It also met what was laid out in the Land Transport Management Act, which the court noted does not say Waka Kotahi must take climate change into consideration.
Movement chair Christine Rose said the agency was "saying it's doing one thing when, in fact, it's doing something very different".
"It explains why, in the midst of the climate crisis, progress on improved public transport, walking and cycling is so slow whilst our emissions increase," she said in a statement.
The gap in revenue from transport, and blow-outs in spending, has only become more acute since the Transport Ministry warned in 2021 about not having funding to meet emission reduction targets overall.
Asked this week if climate change was still the government's top priority across policy, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said: "Resilience is going to be probably the top priority."
The transport network had been found "wanting" in the cyclone "and we have to put that front and centre of our decisions around transport planning and transport funding", he said.
Controversy over emissions has featured in local transport planning, for instance in Tauranga, where the regional council did not think the main Cameron Rd upgrade took emissions into account enough, and where locals joined forces in a lobby group and petition asking for an independent review to get a better design that delivered - among other things - lower emissions.
