Improving Aotearoa’s environmental reporting system: our submission

ELI recently submitted on proposed amendments to New Zealand’s Environmental Reporting Act which the Government sought feedback on. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment highlighted the passive, opportunistic nature of our existing reporting in 2019. He identified that we have been reporting based on a ‘passive harvest’ of information rather than measuring authoritatively what is happening to our environment. The PCE recognised that if we are to focus on what matters, we need reporting that is going to tell us whether a specific problem is improving or deteriorating.

The Government’s proposals sought to address the issues outlined in the PCE’s report. ELI’s submission agreed that changes to address those issues are needed, but pointed out that some of the proposals are unlikely to do so. The submission sought that a specified set of core environmental indicators should be regulated for, to provide reporting which tracks changes to the environment. The government’s proposal to regulate themes or topics relating to core indicators, while allowing the actual indicators to be chosen in reporting would not guarantee this. We also sought that there be more focus on transparency accessibility of the data which supports environmental reporting, particularly for the core environmental indicators.

ELI is concerned that the report remains unclear about changes to indicators outlined in the previous synthesis report, which would enable readers to track changes to the environment since the previous report was published. Read our full submission below.