# Reporting on Climate Emergency Response Fund (CERF), Quarter 1, 2022-23

Prepared/created by: The Treasury
Date published/issued: 16 December 2022

## About this Data Release

### Description:

In 2021, the Government announced the establishment of the CERF with an initial $4.5 billion ‘down payment’ for Aotearoa New Zealand’s climate spending by recycling the proceeds of the Emissions Trading Scheme into a dedicated fund.

The CERF is an enduring, multi-year fund which is designed to address the long-term nature of many of the challenges presented by climate change. The CERF is intended to provide funding certainty over multi-year periods and a dedicated funding source for public investment on climate-related initiatives distinct from the main Budget allowances.

An initiative is eligible for funding from the CERF if it:
- is included in an Emissions Reduction Plan, or directly supports emissions reductions (domestically or internationally),
- is included in a National Adaptation Plan, or directly reduces vulnerability or exposure to the impacts of climate change,
- supports a te ao Māori approach to the climate response,
- addresses the distributional impacts of climate change or the climate policy response, or
- supports the development of any initiatives meeting these criteria in the future.


Any agency which receives CERF funding is required to provide regular monitoring and reporting updates to Treasury for publication. This information includes quarterly financial reporting and annual non-financial information, all focused on the initiative level.

This approach is different to the Crown’s existing monitoring and reporting processes, which are focused on appropriation-level data. This shift in granularity in CERF reporting has been done to provide an additional layer of scrutiny for special purpose funding provided for climate objectives.

The first results of this monitoring and reporting, for the three months from 1 July 2022, is now available. 

For each initiative these results show the actual spending for the year to date, alongside forecasts for the next three quarters. Spending is tracked against the baseline appropriation for each initiative and any material changes to that baseline are also indicated.

Although 26 initiatives were funded from the CERF in Budget 2022, one initiative has not been included in the dataset. That initiative is ‘Increasing woody biomass supply to replace coal and other carbon intensive fuels and materials’. This is because the funding is being held centrally until further design work has been completed. This means funding has not yet commenced, so cannot be reported against. 

The next results, for the three months from 1 October 2022, will be available on this page in early 2023, and subsequent results will be published regularly after that. 

The data in this release comes from data provided by agencies. Users of this data should note that it is subject to audit.


Copyright: © Crown Copyright
Rights (license for re-use): Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Rights explanation: This copyright work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. In essence, you are free to copy, distribute and adapt the work, as long as you attribute the work to the Crown (The Treasury) and abide by the other licence terms. Please note that no departmental or governmental emblem, logo or Coat of Arms may be used in any way which infringes any provision of the Flags, Emblems, and Names Protection Act 1981 or would infringe such provision if the relevant use occurred within New Zealand. Attribution to the Crown (The Treasury) should be in written form and not by reproduction of any such emblem, logo or Coat of Arms.
Contact for feedback: The Treasury welcomes feedback and suggestions for improvement of this dataset. Email performance.info@treasury.govt.nz

### Related files:

Four files for this Report. 

- MS Excel Workbook - Includes raw data, data dictionary, introduction notes: reporting-cerf.xlsx 

- Introduction Notes - Text format: reporting-cerf-notes.txt

- Data Dictionary sheet - CSV format: reporting-cerf-data-dictionary.csv

- Raw Data sheet - CSV format: reporting-cerf-data.csv


### Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

### NZGOAL (New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing) framework
https://www.data.govt.nz/manage-data/policies/nzgoal/