Focus Live: PM Jacinda Ardern and associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage speak to the media about phasing out plastic. Video / Jason Oxenham
Moves to stimulate the economy post-pandemic through fast-tracking major public works projects can't come at the expense of the environment, a Bay advocate says.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson has said Budget 2020 will "set our direction for the next stages of responding and rebuilding".
Last week, Environment Minister David Parkerannounced typical Resource Management Act processes would be accelerated for job-rich projects during the first two years of recovery.
Bay Conservation Alliance chief executive Michelle Elborn said: "We need to ensure that's not at the expense of the environment.
"That's just really important. We are really keen to see in any additional investment - including in the Budget - that there is investment in environmental outcomes.
"That can be investing in improving water quality in regions such as riparian stream plantings, fencing projects, looking at coastal planting, coastal protection ... climate change hasn't gone away so we need to be thinking about what we can be doing around that."
She told the Bay of Plenty Times "one big project" in need in the Western Bay of Plenty was restoring the Kaimai Mamaku Conservation Park.
"People don't realise how poor the condition of that forest is in and the huge biodiversity loss in there. So there's a lot of work going in at the moment around that."
Over the weekend the government announced plans to redeploy unemployed people from hard-hit sectors such as forestry and tourism, into biosecurity and conservation jobs.
The first wave of projects to receive backing were in Northland, East Coast, Hawke's Bay and Canterbury, but the Bay of Plenty and Central North Island were also being considered.
Tauranga Moana Para Kore waste minimisation leader Shirley Simmons would like to see more funding for recycling programmes in New Zealand.
"Overseas markets are not currently taking our waste, our recycling. So we need to look at ways to minimise the generation of that waste, largely plastics ... Minimise its necessity in the home and then look at ways of recirculating it onshore so we are not reliant on overseas markets to dispose of our waste."
Regardless of whether we can send our waste overseas to be recycling "to me personally, I think it's philosophically wrong to send waste overseas", she said.
Recycled waste at a New Zealand transfer station. Photo / Bradley Ambrose
"But then also if we look further back up that whole chain, in some ways its wrong to be bringing it into the country in the first place."
She said one positive outcome from Covid-19 restrictions in New Zealand was the emphasis on staying local and buying local.
