New Zealand is asleep at the wheel on environmental policy – Dr Greg Severinsen

Most environmental problems have not gone away. In fact, they've got worse. Photo / Peter de Graaf

THE FACTS

• Between 2019 and 2024, 46% of groundwater monitoring sites failed to meet drinking water standards for E. coli at least once.
• Between 2016 and 2020, 45% of the country’s total river length was not suitable for swimming.
• In 2022 alone, an estimated 182 million tonnes of eroded soil entered our rivers and oceans.

Once upon a time, New Zealand was a leader in environmental law and policy. The Resource Management Act was visionary when enacted in 1991, intending to set biophysical bottom lines to ensure things like the life-supporting capacity of water and soil were safeguarded, while enabling development that was sustainable.

Did that happen? Most environmental problems have not gone away. In fact, they’ve got worse. New challenges, such as climate change, have emerged. Over the last couple of decades, we’ve made progress in some areas but overall, we’ve been asleep at the wheel.

Consider this. We have the highest proportion of threatened or at-risk indigenous species in the world – more than 4000 of them. Between 2019 and 2024, 46% of groundwater monitoring sites failed to meet drinking water standards for E. coli at least once. Between 2016 and 2020, 45% of the country’s total river length was not suitable for swimming. In 2022 alone, an estimated 182 million tonnes of eroded soil entered our rivers and oceans.

The list goes on. Our nature is in a parlous state.

Decades of these statistics mean we should be open to new ideas to improve our natural world in a way that still enables the provision of homes, jobs and incomes. But we are watching other countries innovate, while our laws stagnate – and even go backwards.

So, pack your bags. Let’s go on a tour.

We’ll start with the United Kingdom’s 2021 Environment Act. This requires long-term, measurable and achievable targets to be set for biodiversity, air and water quality, resource efficiency and waste reduction. Once set, targets cannot be weakened unless there is a change in circumstances. The Government has a legal duty to meet the targets, including through the creation of environmental improvement plans that are reviewed every five years and can be challenged. They’re not just aspirations.

The act includes progressive requirements such as a 10% net biodiversity gain for all new developments. Its policy embeds the precautionary and polluter-pays principles, which must be adhered to in almost all decisions by Government (with narrow exceptions for tax and defence). Before any new law is made, ministers are required to provide “non-regression” statements, setting out whether a bill will reduce levels of environmental protection. An independent “Office for Environmental Protection” has been established too. This keeps tabs on the Government’s progress towards targets and highlights where new legislation is regressive. It can take the Government to court for breaches of environmental law and has provided a powerful incentive to do better.

Now, sailing across the Channel to the 27 countries of the European Union, where a “Nature Restoration Law” has just been enacted. This requires the restoration of at least 20% of land and sea areas by 2030 and 90% of degraded habitats by 2050. Targets are legally binding, and some requirements are very specific, such as the requirement to restore 25,000km of “free-flowing” rivers and floodplains. In 2015, Paris also created a permis de végétaliser (a right to plant). This innovation allows anyone access to green public spaces such as footpaths, walls and fences.

Heading to Asia, in Singapore, nature is being integrated into human habitation to create a “city in a garden”. Under its Green Plan and landscape replacement policy, developers must replace greenery lost from a site in other areas within the footprint of the development. This has generated a proliferation of vertical green walls, sky terraces and rooftop gardens.

Housing developments are designed to make use of natural cooling mechanisms. They purify their own water, store monsoon rains for irrigation and provide a home for threatened species to return.

Spatial planning there isn’t just about pipes and roads – it’s being used to connect up “green highways” for wildlife across the whole country. Despite being a small island which is effectively one big city, green cover is now 47% of Singapore’s land area, including 130ha of rooftop gardens.

On the way home, let’s visit Australia. Victoria’s 2017 Environment Protection Act proclaims that all people are entitled to live in a safe and healthy environment, irrespective of their personal attributes or location. The act creates an enforceable “general environmental duty”, which requires anyone creating a risk to human health or the environment to minimise those risks, whether they have a consent or not.

So, suitably inspired, we land back on our own shores. And we are met with some jarring contrasts.

We have a fast-track consenting regime with a purpose that, in my view, ignores the environment, and new powers for ministers to put a red line through council environmental regulations. A future system will be based on the narrow economic concept of managing “externalities”, which I believe will leave landowners largely to do what they want with their land. There will be more activities that won’t need consent at all. National-level bottom lines for freshwater quality may be removed. There will be no real constraints on urban sprawl. Landowners will need to be compensated for some public-interest environmental regulation. And environmental “limits” might not actually be limits at all, but rather something that can be trumped by other things like jobs and profit.

This is just scratching the surface of what a system where property rights and short-term growth are elevated above all else will mean. Of course, “development versus environment” is a false dichotomy. Many countries around the globe understand that nature protection is essential to the economy. For example, the European Union has calculated that every euro invested in nature will provide a €4 to €38 ($8-$76) return.

A study in the UK showed that environmental degradation is already slowing the economy and could cause a 12% decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the near future. That’s larger than the impact of Covid-19 or the Global Financial Crisis.

So, in our little corner of the Pacific, it’s clear that we are going from leader to laggard. It’s time to change direction to catch up, and fast.

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