100% Pure?

Matthew Ledbury

6 Oct 2006

New Zealand trades heavily on its image as an unspoilt oasis leading the world in environmental efforts. However being an environmental leader involves more than showing off our untouched landscapes – it’s all about action. Matthew Ledbury asks is New Zealand doing enough?

ENVIRONMENT: Ask anyone from outside New Zealand to describe the country, and the chances are that the words ‘clean and green’ will be used. The popular perception is of a beautiful and environmentally-aware land of towering mountain peaks, pristine countryside, crystal-clear lakes, lush vegetation, and unique wildlife. Such an image is enthusiastically promoted by Tourism New Zealand, whose marketing slogan seeks to remind the public that the country is ‘100% Pure’.

The strength of this image is one that is not lightly ignored in New Zealand, as it is a substantial driver of the value the country is able to obtain for its goods and services internationally. A 2001 study for the Ministry of the Environment found that the "clean and green" image was worth "hundreds of millions, possibly billions of dollars".

Recent evaluations of the country would appear to suggest that the reality is matching the image. In a study by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities earlier this year for the World Economic Forum, New Zealand was found to lead the world in meeting key environmental goals. Researchers assessed how close 133 countries came to reaching 16 environmental goals including air quality, biodiversity, and sus-tainable energy. New Zealand came top with a score of 88 per cent.

Certainly New Zealand has the advantage of a low population density resulting in relatively benign environmental pressures, and unlike many western countries, it has had no industrial revolution to tarnish its landscape, nor problems associated with overcrowded cities. In common with other top ranking countries, it is also a relatively wealthy country with effective regulation and little corruption, and it has the ability to commit significant resources to tackling environmental protection. Yet while the wider world might rate the country as one of the best, New Zealanders themselves seem less sure. In 2001, the Government undertook a public consultation on sustainable development 10 years on from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. More than three-quarters of the 3,500 respondents said that the New Zealand environment was not as healthy as it should be, with one-fifth saying it needed "intensive care". The then environment minister, Marion Hobbs, commented that a more accurate view of the country would be, "somewhat clean, still green around the edges".

The co-leader of the Green Party, Jeanette Fitzsimons, has spent much of her professional life working to improve the quality of the environment in New Zealand. There are changes she has welcomed. "One-third of the country is managed by DOC as protected land, and growing appreciation of our unique ecology means that much effort has gone into eliminating predators. We’ve set air quality standards, we’re protecting coastal waters through marine reserves, and the recent developments in wind energy have been very positive."

However, she believes there are still huge problems in large policy areas such as energy and transport that need to be tackled before the country could credibly deserve the ‘clean and green’ description. One area that is widely agreed to be of mounting concern is the threat to the country’s fresh water.

Dairy farmers have achieved major gains in economic productivity over the last decade, including higher milk production volumes and an increase in the weight of animals, as they strive to retain their position against global competition. But this has been against a background of soaring use of nitrogen fertilisers, and together with other activities including discharges from septic tanks, soak fields and urban runoff, it has increased the already troubled state of many streams and lakes.

Four years ago, the dairy cooperative Fonterra negotiated a ‘clean streams accord’ to try and encourage farmers to improve the situation. But according to Bryce Johnson of Fish and Game, which manages New Zealand's sportsfish and game resources, there has been very little improvement so far. "Fonterra gives out good rhetoric, but their own figures show that the amount of land where ‘nutrient budgeting’ is taking place has increased by just 2 per cent, from 17 per cent to 19 per cent," he says. "The accord is clearly inadequate – voluntary agreements are a nonsense as those farmers that are the problem just won’t do anything unless they are forced to."

A report into farming two years ago by the Parliamentary Commiss-ioner for the Environment (PCE), Morgan Williams, entitled "Growing for Good", recommended the redesigning of farming systems to reduce the pressures on the environment. While it found a lot of positive activity taking place, "existing initiatives are not sufficiently profound or widespread enough to make a real and lasting difference," it warned. Around 60 per cent of New Zealand’s lakes are now considered degraded, with many suffering from eutrophication – the accumulation of organic material due to an increase in nutrient levels, leading to a gradual filling in of the lake. The problem is at its most acute in the 12 Rotorua lakes, where toxic blue-green algal blooms have been appearing – visible as a pea-green soupiness, it poisons both animals and humans. In a report specifically on the Rotorua lakes published earlier this year, the PCE highlighted the scale of the problem. "To turn back the nutrient tide we face some very tough land-use decisions," he said. However, he pointed to progress being made in restoring the lakes, with considerable resources put into the Rotorua Lakes Protection and Restoration Programme established in 2003.

The Government has recently set up a new high-level group embracing cabinet ministers, industry representatives, and other interested parties, to come up with solutions to improve the water situation. Bryce Johnson remains optimistic that this could help force positive change. "The Government is recognising there’s a problem that needs acting on – we’ve never had this from a government before."

The traditional view of New Zealand remains that of a largely rural, agricultural population. However, demographic changes and population growth have meant that this is now far from true – over 80 per cent of the population now lives in settlements of 1000 people or more. In the largest of these, environmental problems are becoming increasingly evident. Auckland in particular is facing pressure at the hands of exponential development and growth – the region’s current population growth is equivalent to adding a town the size of Taupo every year – with water quality and aquatic habitats suffering in particular. Sediment from land-clearing for development has had severe impacts on Auckland’s waterways, turning once pristine stream and harbour-beds into mudflats.

The Auckland regional growth strategy, agreed to by all of Auckland’s councils in 1999 to try and curb urban sprawl, seeks to accommodate 70 per cent of future growth within the existing urban area by focusing on higher density housing levels, particularly around transport interchanges, although encouraging developers to accept this is proving a problem. Inspiration may be sought from the other end of the North Island: recent changes in Wellington have seen the city transform itself into arguably New Zealand’s first truly urban centre, without the range of problems that are bedevilling Auckland. The 1990s saw an 800 per cent increase in the number of residents in the city and sharp increases in the central city pedestrian counts, gradually turning it into a viable, higher-density settlement.

Yet the growth of the urban footprint across the country is having a major impact on air quality, in particular due to the Kiwis’ love of the car. A recent study by two Australian urban planning academics found that Auckland has become one of the world’s most car-dependent cities. Lax regulations on car emissions and fuel quality have given the city air that is frequently poorer in quality than London or Los Angeles.

A 2002 report undertaken by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) estimated that 399 people aged 30 and over were dying each year from exposure to particles from vehicle emissions – a figure higher than those in the same age range who were being killed in road accidents. Part of the problem is to do with the quality of the car fleet which has an average age of eight years old, due in part to the number of second-hand vehicles imported from Japan. Despite pressure from the Green Party, government plans for mandatory emissions tests have been dropped, officially at least over concern about the accuracy of testing equipment.

If New Zealand is failing in its bid to be ‘clean and green’ it is certainly not for the lack of genuine concern that can be found among many Kiwis. The country has a strong record of innovating and leading the way in many areas. The forerunner of the current Green Party, the Values Party, was the first national political party of its type in the world when it was formed in 1972. The Parliamentary Commissioner of the Environment, a position independent of the government with a wide-ranging investigative brief, was also the world’s first when it was created in 1986 – a position that has now been copied by many other countries including the Netherlands, Canada, and the Australian Capital Territory. Perhaps most significant is the 1991 Resource Management Act (RMA), a pioneering piece of legislation in the area of sustainable development that was world-leading and is frequently used as a guide for other countries considering environmental law reform.

Some observers argue that it is the country’s political structure that is restricting its ability to tackle issues head on. In the UK, many environmental improvements have been driven by a succession of European Union directives, which the UK is legally obliged to implement. The EU offers a pan-European view and can make decisions in areas that national governments would be more reluctant to take on if they damaged their perceived self-interest. In contrast, there are no supranational bodies that can hand down broad policy in New Zealand, making the government susceptible to high-level lobbying by vested interests keen to prevent change.

The political culture can also weaken the international agreements New Zealand signs up to: Helen Clark’s government forced through acceptance of the Kyoto Protocol, only to later buckle under the need for the support of the handful of New Zealand First and United Future MPs after the 2005 general election. The package drawn up in 2002 to help meet the Government’s obligations under the treaty, which included a Carbon Tax, has all but been abandoned, and the country now looks set to exceed its emissions target by around 30 per cent.

The 2001 Ministry for the Environment report pointed out that it was environmental image rather than environmental quality per se that created the clean and green value that New Zealand goods enjoy. However, it warned that while New Zealand may be able in the short term to retain the value in the face of declining environmental quality, in the long term one could expect the two to track each other. Moreover, many Kiwis remain adamant that the substance must match the reality. "I’ve been warning for some years that if we lose the image we’ll never get it back. It’s ridiculous – nothing is ‘100% Pure’, and to pretend so is environmental illiteracy," Jeanette Fitzsimons says. "Instead it is time we started trying to live up to the image rather than just using it as though it is true."

Matthew Ledbury is the former editor of ‘New Zealand Environment’ magazine.

– NZinspired magazine, August 2006

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