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State of the Environment report - Expert reaction
State of the Environment report - Expert reaction
22 October 2015
The Government yesterday launched a new environmental report – Environment Aotearoa 2015 – showing the overall state of our environment.
Environment Aotearoa 2015 focuses on five areas or ‘domains’-- air, atmosphere and climate, fresh water, land, and marine -- only including statistics that could be considered accurate and reliable.
The full report and accompanying press information is available on the Statistics New Zealand website. The report is also accompanied by an interactive website allowing New Zealanders to explore the data behind the statistics.
The Science Media Centre collected the following expert commentary on the separate domains covered in the report. Feel free to use these quotes in your reporting.
These comments are abridged, full comments can be found on our website. Further comments will be added to the Science Media Centre website as they come in.
NEW: Dr April Bennett, Lecturer - Maori Environmental & Resource Planning, Massey University comments:
"I think if I were to say one thing about the report it would be that it acknowledges that tangata whenua are kaitiaki and then raises a number of red flags that will probably confirm for those kaitiaki that their environment is not in good shape and in some respects is getting worse.
"Having taken only a very quick look at the report, it seems there are 3 main areas of concern: 1) the threat of extinction across the marine environment and the increasing acidity of our oceans; 2) climate change, and the potential effects on Māori communities, including marae and land-based businesses; and 3) increasing nitrogen levels in rivers as a result of dairy farming expansion and intensification.
"The responsibility of kaitiaki is to safeguard the environment for future generations, to hand on a legacy that is the same, if not better than the one that current generations experience. Notwithstanding the difficulties that kaitiaki face in exercising their duties beyond a local scale, the report sends a serious and worrying message that things are not good, and that we are very much in danger of failing to hand on the taonga that we have been entrusted to care for."
NEW: Prof Martin Manning, Climate Change Research Institute, School of Geography Environment and Earth Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, comments on the Climate and Atmosphere section:
"I think that the section of the report covering climate change issues was quite limited in scope. While vulnerability to extreme events is being covered in the context of water and land, the increasing evidence for NZ's coastal vulnerability to storm events is not covered. For example, recent storm damage has led to the Wellington - Lower Hutt railway line being taken out for several days and to coastal erosion in Island Bay now becoming a major issue for Wellington City Council to deal with.
"While a scientific attribution of such extreme events being caused by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is still not clear, from a risk management perspective the apparent trends are important."
NEW: Dr Ronlyn Duncan, Lecturer in Water Management, Department of Environmental Management, Lincoln University, comments on the Fresh Water section:
"Although the report represents a picture of freshwater that is well known, the collation of long-term data and its analysis does provide some useful information to feed back into policy and management. For example, it would appear that interventions to better manage effluent and address bank erosion are slowing down phosphorus getting into rivers. However, I think more explanation beyond monitored river types is needed to explain why NIWA results show a worsening trend in this respect while regional council data shows an improvement.
"I would have liked to have seen more explanation about the frequency of sampling - not just the number of sites - as well as more disclosure about how data sets have been standardised across the many jurisdictions given how variable data collection methods and reporting can be. How have the many complex issues been overcome to build a national picture?
"Mentioned only twice in the entire report, drinking water is a gaping hole in the freshwater chapter. The chapter repeatedly states that freshwater is vital to the economy and sets out in detail how freshwater supports the economy, recreation, Maori well-being and identity, and aquatic biodiversity. Undoubtedly, but it is also vital for and supports human life. What does the analysis explicitly tell us about our drinking water? – very little."
NEW: Dr Bethanna Jackson, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography, Victoria University, comments:
“Overall think the report is a good summary of the issues for the general public and non-scientists.
“I saw no surprises and the statistics look OK – as useful as they could be expected to be given the underlying data is pretty sparse/aggregated and we don’t have much baseline information. The report does a fairly good job of pointing out these shortcomings.
“I was a bit concerned by the land section under-stressing the importance of irrigation and other managements practices leading to phosphorous, and even more importantly, nitrogen loss. It focused almost completely on nutrient input, and the key message seems that ‘we apply more nutrients to the land than grass and other plants can use’
“Simple is good, but I thought perhaps this is over-simplified, and a slightly dangerous message. Too much irrigation (or rain) to an appropriate amount of nutrients will cause leaching before the vegetation can take it up, for example."
ends
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