Environment policy so bad things can only improve

BY ROD ORAM

OPINION: THE GOVERNMENT'S decision to create an autonomous Environmental Protection Authority has the potential to improve New Zealand's environmental and economic performance. But it won't be easy.

The fact that the recent cabinet decision was warmly welcomed by both sides of the environment debate highlighted the failure of many crucial aspects of current environmental policy and practice.

Quite simply, we lack national environmental standards, monitoring and management. As a result, regional and unitary councils tasked with managing the environment do so with varying degrees of consistency, success and timeliness.

Environmentalists end up frustrated by the country's deteriorating performance on many ecological measures, and resource consent applicants are frustrated when delays and arbitrary decisions dog the process.

And the pressures will only get worse. Of all developed countries, we are the most dependent on our natural environment for earning our living from the likes of the primary sector and tourism. So, as the government tries to double the growth rate of the past decade, the failures and conflicts of the current system will only compound.

The Resource Management Act is good at integrating land use planning and environmental management: it is a one-stop shop for such integrated consents; it takes a catchment-wide view of water; it has broad public participation provisions; and the Environment Court is an authoritative arbitrator.

But it is failing because its environmental assessment is based on mitigating the impacts of individual consents. It cannot handle cumulative impacts from multiple consents for the likes of taking water for irrigation. Essentially it can allocate resources only on the basis of first come, first served. And it can't adequately handle diffuse sources of pollution.

The government is working on various ways to solve those issues. But it knows those improvements will prove effective only if they are underpinned by national environmental policies, standards, monitoring and management.

The RMA provides for such national standards but successive governments over two decades have found them too difficult and contentious to write. For example, the one on coastal development proved so ineffective it has been under review since 2002 even as rampant coastal subdivision was experiencing a spectacular boom and bust.

We have also failed to achieve credible national reporting on environmental measures. The Ministry for the Environment tried in 1997 and 2007, but both reports were shot through with incompatible, inconsistent and incomplete data.

We are the only developed country that has failed to implement national environmental standards and monitoring, as the OECD commented forcefully in its 2007 report on our environmental performance.

The best way to correct those two chronic gaps, National argued in its 2008 election manifesto, was to reduce the ministry to a policy adviser to the government on the likes of national standards and to create an Environmental Protection Authority.

In essence, the EPA would become a centre of standards, expertise and discipline to help regional and unitary councils meet their environmental responsibilities.

Within weeks of coming to power, the National-led government announced it would create an EPA. Initially, though, it would process only nationally significant consents for the likes of major power projects called in from local government. Wider roles would be subject to further study, it said, and almost 18 months later, the cabinet has decided them. The EPA will be an autonomous Crown agency, not part of a ministry. This will make the EPA somewhat arm's-length from government but it will still have to execute government policy if the relevant minister tells it to.

The government has also given the EPA a wide range of responsibilities. It will, for example, absorb the Environmental Risk Management Agency (Erma) and its role with hazardous materials, take on much of the administration of the Emissions Trading Scheme and other climate change legislation and deal with environmental issues in Antarctica and our vast Exclusive Economic Zone at sea.

But the government has yet to make many crucial decisions about what the EPA will do and how it will do it once it is operational in its expanded form in July next year. Here are seven key ones the government must get right:

Independence: The EPA will earn wide public support only if it shows it is highly competent and free from political interference.

Standards: The EPA must have them to do its job. But they will prove as difficult as ever for the ministry to write unless the government takes a collaborative approach that brings in all interested parties across business, the environment and wider society.

The Land and Water Forum is the first example of that. Its initial report on water is due next month.

This will be a critical test of the government's willingness to work with the consensus offered it rather than pick and choose to suit its own views.

Monitoring: Even if standards are based on broad support, the public won't believe in them unless they are backed by a large set of environmental measures. The EPA must monitor them rigorously and police them diligently.

Scope: The government must give the EPA a comprehensive mandate. For example, the Swedish EPA has 16 high-level, public consensus environmental objectives such as the quality of freshwater lakes. These are underpinned by 72 targets with specific goals and timelines. It will take us a while to develop a similar framework but we need to if we are to have a co-ordinated, effective approach to environmental management.

Capability: Successful EPAs around the world are well staffed with scientists, engineers and other specialists. Sweden's, for example, has 550 people and an annual budget of $75 million.

In our case, all the interesting financial analysis was omitted from the cabinet paper released. But the skimpy detail remaining suggests that the EPA will start with only 50 staff from the Environment Ministry and the Economic Development Ministry and 90 from Erma working on a budget of under $30m a year. Let's hope that is only a starting point. It would be a disaster to do what we so often do – kill off a great initiative by starving it.

Relationships: The EPA must work well with regional and unitary councils, offering them expertise but also strong discipline to make sure they lift their game. The EPA must also show it can respond to local needs rather than blindly impose blanket national solutions. And it must be careful not to weaken councils by hiring too many of their skilled people.

Coast and ocean: These are very complex areas, particularly the latter. Our Exclusive Economic Zone is 16 times our land area and we're only just beginning to realise how difficult it will be to responsibly open it up to oil, gas, mineral and other exploration.

Environment Minister Nick Smith is promising to finish by the end of this year the work on an EEZ bill begun by Labour. That's a very big mistake. This subject demands a vast amount of ground-breaking legislation. We need to devote adequate time and effort to it to prevent the likes of the current Gulf of Mexico crisis happening here.

In fact, these are such difficult issues, the EPA needs coastal and EEZ commissions within its structure, as advocated by the Environmental Defence Society. The society has written an excellent paper, available on www.eds.org.nz, on best practice from around the world on EPAs and how to translate and develop that for the New Zealand version.

A radically new collaborative process needs to be the heart of all this. If the government can break the mould with Maori relations, it can also do so for the environment, thereby triggering vastly improved environmental and economic performance.

- © Fairfax NZ News