Environz

• Better systems for better outcomes
• RMA on the road
• Fiordland Marine Guardians release annual report
• Environmental Protection Authority is born
• Tui Mine – two years on
• Waste Minimisation Fund criteria released
• LUCAS 2009 – a space odyssey
• Greener future for NZ film
• We can’t manage what we don’t measure
• Electric vehicles catch the eye of the Kiwi motorist
• National Environmental Reporting Forum
• In brief & For your diary

National Environmental Reporting Forum

The Ministry for the Environment’s six-monthly National Environmental Reporting Forum brings together regional councils, central government, iwi groups, professional bodies, NGOs, scientists and researchers to discuss and develop collective issues facing environmental monitoring and reporting in New Zealand.

The idea for a national forum came together in the wake of New Zealand’s second State of the Environment report which was released in January 2008. In evaluating the processes for producing the report, it became clear to those involved that many of the complex issues facing national-scale environmental reporting needed a number of parties to come together to solve them.

“Environmental reporting is dependent on the monitoring that underpins it, and we rely on the goodwill of our reporting partners to do our reporting work,” says Todd Krieble, Director of Information at the Ministry, who opened the most recent forum in October.

“We all need to work together to solve some of the long-term issues for environmental reporting for New Zealand – they are complex problems that need multi-party actions to solve them. We need reciprocity, where we all work together in a system-based fashion to look at and improve overall environmental performance,” Krieble says.

Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry for the Environment were also interested in bringing together participants from the existing Environmental Statistics User Group with providers of environmental information to create a more integrated discussion for improving environmental statistics and information, and making them more readily available.

Dallas Welch, Deputy Government Statistician, who also helped open the latest forum, said the forums align well with the Government’s goals of ensuring that the real value of information is understood, and getting it out in the public domain and used for maximum impact.

The Ministry’s national environmental reporting programme trialled a pilot environmental reporting forum in August 2008. The most recent forum had over three times as many participants as last year’s pilot forum.

The forum is a great benefit to the Ministry’s Statistics and Geospatial team who are in charge of reporting on the state of New Zealand’s environment. Justine Daw, Manager of the Statistics and Geospatial team, says the forum aims to create a greater commonality in the way various agencies monitor and report on the environment.

“We have updated more than half of the 66 national environmental data sets in less than two years since releasing the New Zealand State of the Environment Report. The forum is an excellent way for us to showcase and get feedback on this work and helps us focus on producing a more unified reporting framework,” says Daw.

“The information shared at the forum also helps us produce more work that integrates economic factors with environmental reporting so we can produce more meaningful analysis.”

National environmental reporting forums take place every six months – the next forum will be held in Wellington in April 2010.

If you would like to know more about the next national environmental reporting forum, please contact environmental.reporting@mfe.govt.nz or go to www.mfe.govt.nz/environmental-reporting/about/partnerships/forum.html

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