Looking to the future

We have set commitments and targets for the impacts of our internal operational activities, our environmental footprint, our staff and our culture. However, we have chosen not to outline commitments and set targets in this report for our external impacts (eg, for the policies we develop). This is because the review of our strategic direction, priorities and structure is still under way at the time of publication.

During 2003 we will be publishing our first Statement of Intent. This is a new form of strategic plan for government departments, which will set out our strategy over the next three years for managing the outcomes the Government seeks for the environment. It will also seek to demonstrate how the things we do and produce (our outputs) will contribute in the long run to the achievement of those outcomes.

Overall we can conclude that although we are doing many things right, to live up to our mission of “making a difference through environmental leadership” we are faced with some major challenges.

Prioritisation: We are spread too thinly and need to make decisions about our priorities and our structure, so that we become more effective. We expect to make decisions on the key directions of our work programme in early 2003.
Provide national leadership: We need to focus more firmly on providing leadership and guidance, and to speak with a more confident voice on environmental issues.
Focus on outcomes: We need to focus more on outcomes rather than processes. We will start to address this challenge in our forthcoming Statement of Intent.
State of the environment reporting: Through our partnership agreements with regional councils, we are initiating the process by which local authorities will collect data in a consistent way for national reporting.
Embedding the triple bottom line process: We need to engage with our staff to ensure that the process started by this report is built upon and improved.

[ Previous Page|Next Page ]