This week's New Zealand environmental report is a step towards a new generation of insight into our life-support system, and a wealth of science data and analysis to measure, understand and accelerate our progress
Opinion: Environment Aotearoa 2022, the triennial report on the health of nature in our nation published today, marks two key developments in this crucial discipline - one we lead on, and one we lag on compared with other countries.
First, the report uses Te Ao Māori, our indigenous worldview that all living and non-living things are interconnected and interdependent, as its overarching structure. It reports the scientific data we collect on 48 measures of ecosystem health; describes the relationships between them that determine the overall state of nature; and then highlights how that contributes to our wellbeing - environmentally and economically, socially and culturally.
The previous report in 2019 made a first attempt at that. It identified some of the key ways we live and earn a living, how they interact with our environment, and thus how they affect - positively and negatively - things we value such as economy, health, recreation, culture and identity.
This report, though, is a big step forward. Describing those complex relationships in Te Ao Māori terms makes them easier to understand and draws out their life, power and richness. This helps us understand the huge task we have to learn how to work with nature, not against it. So when nature flourishes anew, so do we.
Some other countries and cultures are on the same journey. For example, Australia is incorporating indigenous knowledge for the first time in its next once-every-five years State of the Environment Report, due out shortly.
“If there is one thing that stands out from the first cycle of reports, it is the extent of what we don’t know about what’s going on with our environment.” – Simon Upton, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment
Likewise, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s climate science body, is increasingly integrating indigenous knowledge and local knowledge systems with natural and social sciences in its reports. The goal is to improve decision making processes, reduce maladaptation, and foster transformational adaptation.
On this, Aotearoa has two big advantages. First, our islands were the last large land mass on the planet to be settled by humans. Ever since their first encounter with nature here, Māori have been accumulating knowledge and wisdom about it. It is one of the best kept and most widely used bodies of indigenous knowledge.
Dating back more than 600 years, “Mātauranga Māori represents the only human record we have of the environment of these islands and their surrounding waters. For that reason alone, it is of immense importance. Given how much we do not know, we can ill afford to disregard this traditionally curated knowledge,” wrote Simon Upton, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, in his 2019 paper on our environmental reporting.
Second, our 11 National Science Challenges, by design, are drawing on Mātauranga Māori and Western science to progress their decade-long, interdisciplinary programmes on our most complex and important science. It’s a symbiotic relationship in which the two disciplines are helping each other advance. It’s one of the best examples of such in the world.
The second reason Environment Aotearoa 2022 is important is its role as a transitional document on the road to much more effective environmental reporting. Unconscionably, we were the last OECD country to install a proper reporting regime. That was in 2015, and we didn’t do it well.
The Parliamentary Commissioner was forthright about that in his 2019 report: “To say that we have designed a national environmental reporting system would be to overstate its coherence. It has been more a case of cobbling together what we have to hand, trying to solicit the willing engagement of a wide range of stakeholders and putting the hat around to try to plug some of the many gaps. If there is one thing that stands out from the first cycle of reports, it is the extent of what we don’t know about what’s going on with our environment.”
He made a raft of recommendations, many of which are in the process of being adopted. These include improved coverage, reliability and timeliness of data; expanding the reporting framework to include drivers and outlooks for many of the key measures; and requiring ministers to respond to the reports.
Meanwhile, as a transition report, Environment Aotearoa 2022 brings together data from earlier domain reports on air, freshwater, marine, atmosphere and climate, and land in the three-year reporting cycle, plus updates on 11 measures. Here are five of the new findings:
* The area of urban land in Aotearoa increased by 15 percent from 1996 to 2018. This caused the area of highly productive land lost to agriculture to rise by 54 percent 2002-2019. This pushed agriculture and horticulture on to less productive land, which meant farmers used more fertiliser and irrigation to maintain productivity.
* There was no overall improving trend in soil quality observed over the period 1994-2018.
* The area of publicly accessible green space in our urban areas remains low compared with Europe. This disadvantages the 84 percent of us who live in towns and cities. New Plymouth is our best-served town, yet only 13 percent of it is green space. In contrast, Oslo is the best endowed European city with 68 percent of its area green space.
Our lack of access to green space is likely to disadvantage urban Māori, who disproportionately live in lower socio-economic areas and tend to have fewer opportunities to connect with nature, the report says. There are, though, some new initiatives, it adds, such as the Waiwhakareke Natural Heritage Park in Hamilton, which is an example of successful urban forest restoration, and the proposed Avon Ōtākaro River park in eastern Christchurch, which aims to restore native habitats for birds and other species.
There are also some large-scale conservation and regeneration projects near cities such as Cape to City in Hawke’s Bay and Taranaki Mounga near New Plymouth. (A further source of information on the positive effects of nature on wellbeing is this report on a symposium in Wellington last year. Disclosure - I was one of the speakers).
* Air quality is slowly improving across the country. But air quality in many cities falls below the World Health Organisation’s 2021 guidelines.
* The area of exotic forestry in 2018 was 12 percent higher than in 1996 (an increase of 220,922ha). Of the land converted to forests, three quarters was previously exotic grassland.
Overall, though, the report’s big improvement on its predecessor three years ago is the way it describes our entire ecosystem and our relationship with it.
To do so, it uses Te Kāhui o Matariki (the Matariki star cluster) as a way to present its evidence. Each of the stars in it represents a way we connect with the environment. And as a signal of the Māori new year, Matariki commemorates loss and celebrates hope for the future.
By using Te Ao Māori so effectively, Environment Aotearoa 2022 give us a sense of what our next generation of environmental reporting will look like: a deeply insightful, engaging and uniquely Aotearoa narrative on our relationship with the Earth’s living systems - literally our life-support system; and a wealth of science data and analysis to measure, understand and accelerate our progress.
