NZ ‘flying blind’ on environment
A stark lack of information about New Zealand’s environment means the country is ‘‘flying blind’’ when it comes to the future, a new report says.
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton, who released the report yesterday, has recommended an independent panel patch up the country’s ‘‘inadequate’’ environmental reporting system.
‘‘When we try to find out what’s happening on our land or what’s happening to our water, there are huge gaps,’’ Upton said. ‘‘To say we have designed a national reporting system would be to overstate its coherence.
‘‘Ours has been a passive system that has harvested whatever data is there and done the best it can to navigate what’s missing.’’
Upton used the example of the last survey of land cover, in the summer of 2012-13. ‘‘I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that investors or policymakers should take decisions on the basis of seven-year-old data.’’
The report warns a lack of data could cause poorly designed policies or ‘‘irreversible damage’’.
University of Waikato professor Troy Baisden said ‘‘[our system] has been designed to avoid paying to create the information it needs.’’ Instead, it tried to make sense of information that already existed, Baisden said.
Biological Heritage National Science Challenge co-director Dr Andrea Byrom said she hoped the report would empower the Environment Ministry to get off the ‘‘current treadmill’’. The call for an independent science panel was long overdue and she hoped the report would be a watershed moment to find a future-focused system, ‘‘before it’s too late’’.
Niwa chief scientist Dr Scott Larned said Niwa agreed there were persistent shortages of environmental data, and said some were severe: ‘‘(about) 150 of the thousands of lakes in New Zealand are currently monitored, and less than half of the 150 lakes had sufficient water-quality data for state and trend analysis in the 2019 Niwa report.’’
For future generations, the Government needs to understand how the natural environment is changing, the report says. The current deficiencies are leading to knowledge gaps.
The report says the Environmental Reporting Act 2015 is unhelpful. ‘‘It simply states: ‘The purpose of this act is to require regular reports on New Zealand’s environment’. ’’
Environmental data came from a ‘‘fragmented system’’ of organisations, including government agencies, local government, Crown Research Institutes, consultants and industry.
The auditor-general’s recent report Managing Freshwater Quality noted the lack of information about New Zealand’s rivers and the use of inconsistent methods to collect and analyse data.