Jan Wright

Wellington, May 20 NZPA - New Zealand markets itself as being "clean and green" but doesn't have any legislation requiring national monitoring of the environment, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment says.

The nation needed to step up its game on measuring how clean and green its environment really was, Jan Wright told MPs today.

"New Zealand is the only country in the OECD that does not have regular reporting on the state of our environment required by legislation, she told the environment select committee.

"We have been criticised by the OECD for not having ongoing systematic programmes for collecting useful data - three times."

Regional councils were required to collect some information, but at the national level there had only been sporadic stop-start reporting, with one state of the environment report in 1997, and another in 2007.

Dr Wright noted that a former National Party environment minister, Simon Upton, pointed out in the 1997 report that the clean, green image was under scrutiny in overseas markets and needed to be scientifically substantiated, with efforts made to fix the "brown spots".

He said this could only be done by comprehensive monitoring, fearless acknowledgement of the results and genuine attempts to resolve any problems.

Dr Wright today called for the state of the environment to be properly measured,and reported transparently, with the raw data made freely available on the internet.

She said there were "a million things to measure" and reporting on the state of the environment was much harder than social or economic statistics, because counting people and money is relatively easy.

"What are we most worried about and what would give us the most bang for our measurement buck?" she asked the committee.

A rough measurement of something really important was much more valuable than an accurate measurement of something that didn't really matter.

And a steady ongoing programme was required rather than short-term bursts of activity.

A National Environment Reporting Act should set roles and responsibilities for organisation such as councils and state science companies, and some analysis and writing should be done independently of the Government.

"We need two different things: to report in a transparent way on the reality of our clean green image, and to do it in a way that engenders public trust," Dr Wright said.

If the environmental statistics were made freely available on the internet, and kept updated, people would be able to see what was happening, whether to national biodiversity or to their local river.

Dr Wright said the Manawatu-Wanganui regional council was already providing a lead in standardising water quality measurement by councils so that figures from different catchments could be compared.

The internet data would be the basis for publication of a formal report every few years, with commentary on what people most needed to worry about and why.