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Environmental Indicators Quarterly
Issue 7, Winter 2010 - INFO 522

Fourth National Environmental Information Forum

Participants at the National Environmental
Information Forum

The Ministry for the Environment and Statistics New Zealand jointly hosted the fourth National Environmental Information Forum on 11 May this year. More than 160 participants attended from central and local government, tāngata whenua organisations, health agencies, Crown research institutes, non-governmental organisations, and other agencies with an interest in environmental information.

The aim of the forum is to build a ‘community of interest’ in environmental monitoring and reporting across the country, by bringing together people to showcase best practice, build networks, and provide real examples for reporting partners to take back to their agencies. These actions contribute to the wider goal of improving the accessibility, quality and consistency of environmental data and information.

The overarching themes of the day were open data and evidence informed policy – Kevin Sweeney, Geospatial Custodian with the New Zealand Geospatial Office and Associate Professor Willie Smith from the University of Auckland gave keynote addresses on these themes.

There were around 40 presentations on a wide variety of environmental information-related topics including cultural environmental monitoring, fresh water, economics and the environment, modelling and forecasting, land and biodiversity, and the two key themes.

The afternoon session included four workshops that focused on how to:

• progress permanent, sustainable environmental monitoring by Māori
• progress the development of a marine environmental monitoring programme
• make data openly discoverable and accessible for use in potentially new ways by other agencies
• connect the information we have with the needs of policy-makers, given the increasing expectation to put evidence into policy.

The forum notes and presentations (including audio files for some presentations) are available at: www.mfe.govt.nz/environmental-reporting/about/partnerships/forum-2010-05-11/. For more information contact Kathryn Botherway at (04) 439 7614 or kathryn.botherway@mfe.govt.nz.

Two new freshwater reports

Two new reports prepared for the Ministry for the Environment by NIWA have recently been published on the Ministry’s website. The reports update national indicator data for river water quality in New Zealand and help provide the evidence base for policy- and decision-makers.

The first report, Analysis of national river water quality data for the period 1998–2007, provides information on the state of New Zealand’s rivers and recent trends in river water quality. The report includes data from about 600 regional council and National River Water Quality Network sites.

Key findings on the state of river water (2003–2007):

• The state of water quality and recent trends in New Zealand’s rivers is highly variable around the country.
• Areas where river water quality is significantly deteriorated include lowland areas of Northland, Auckland, Waikato, the east coast of the North Island, Taranaki, Manawatu-Wanganui, Canterbury and Southland.
• Rivers in urban and rural areas generally have poorer water quality compared to native forest. Rural areas in particular are under increasing pressure as land use intensifies.
• On average, between 2003 and 2007 the water was half as clear in areas of pasture compared to areas of native forest. Clear water is important for aquatic life and recreation.
• Based on the river water quality data for 2003–2007, over 50 per cent of sites in Auckland, Waikato, Canterbury and Southland regions had median total nitrogen levels that exceeded the New Zealand guideline value and over 50 per cent of sites in Northland, Auckland, Waikato and Southland had median total phosphorus levels that exceeded the guideline value.

Key findings on recent trends in river water quality (1998–2007):

• A previous study covering a longer time period (1989–2007) showed nationally that nutrient levels increased (deterioration in water quality) and clarity improved.
• However, the recent findings show that changes in water quality at the national scale over the 10 years are varied. Between 1998 and 2007 national water quality deteriorated for total nitrogen, total phosphorus, conductivity and clarity but improved for bacterial and ammoniacal nitrogen levels.
• There were, however, many river sites that showed no significant change between 1998 and 2007.
• Some river sites showed declining water quality between 1998 and 2007. For example, 23 per cent of monitored sites showed a significant increase in total nitrogen levels between 1998 and 2007 and 26 per cent of sites showed a significant decrease in clarity.

The second report models water quality for all river reaches in New Zealand using water quality data for the 600 regional council and national network sites and a range of catchment features such as climate, geology, topography and land cover.

Key findings from this report:

• Based on the modelled water quality, 57 per cent of lowland rivers (rivers lower than 150 metres above sea level) exceed the New Zealand guideline value for total nitrogen and 54 per cent of lowland rivers exceed the total phosphorus guideline value.
• Over 70 per cent of the variation in some aspects of water quality, such as nutrient and bacterial levels, can be explained by catchment features (eg, land cover, climate and geology). This highlights the large influence these features have on water quality and therefore the significant contribution of non-point sources (such as run-off from agriculture) to poor water quality.

Australia’s National Plan for Environmental Information

Australia recently announced their National Plan for Environmental Information. The plan is a long-term commitment to reform Australia’s environmental information base. It is a whole-of-government initiative implemented jointly by the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, and the Bureau of Meteorology. In the first four years, the initiative will:

• introduce legislation that governs environmental information and provides the Bureau of Meteorology with an enduring mandate
• review Australian Government activity in environmental information to identify opportunities for cooperation, consolidation, improvement or efficiencies
• establish a high-level advisory group to provide whole-of-government direction and prioritise environmental information activities
• develop and deliver the first stage of an integrated Environmental Information System to collate, manage and provide public access to national environmental datasets
• develop and issue national environmental information standards
• begin developing a framework to deliver national environmental accounts.

For more information on Australia’s National Plan for Environmental Information visit: www.environment.gov.au/npei/index.html.

New environmental report cards

The Ministry’s national environmental reporting programme regularly produces snapshot report cards that update data for the core set of national environmental indicators. Five new snapshot report cards have been released in recent months.

Seabed trawling

Fishing activity, including seabed trawling, tracks how New Zealand’s fishing profile is changing over time. The area trawled by commercial trawlers and the types of fish expected to be found in trawled areas are measured to report seabed trawling. This report card shows that in 2008, 68 large fishing vessels conducted 38,648 seabed trawls covering 85,222 km². Since 2005, the number of trawls and the area trawled by large fishing vessels has decreased. A combination of fish catch decline and active management to reduce catch of target species has contributed to changes in fishing effort since 1990.

The seabed trawling report card is available at www.mfe.govt.nz/environmental-reporting/report-cards/seabed-trawling/2010/.

Legally protected conservation land

The legally protected conservation land report card shows that one-third of New Zealand’s land area is legally protected for the purpose of conserving biodiversity, the highest proportion of all OECD countries. Legally protected conservation land increased by slightly less than five per cent from 2006, with approximately three-quarters of the increase due to the High Country Tenure Review. The legal protection of New Zealand’s different environments, as mapped by the Land Environments New Zealand classification, remains variable – some environments have greater than 90 per cent of their area legally protected, while others have less than one per cent.

The legally protected conservation land report card is available at www.mfe.govt.nz/environmental-reporting/report-cards/biodiversity/2010/.

Air quality

This report card shows that all airsheds met the national environmental standards for carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and ozone in 2008. This was the first year since the standards were introduced in 2004 that there were no breaches of the national environmental standards for these four pollutants (six breaches occurred in 2005, 14 in 2006 and two in 2007). Between 2005 and 2008, there was a general downward trend in the maximum and annual average levels of carbon monoxide, but mixed trends across monitoring sites for nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide. Ozone levels have remained low during this period.

The air quality report card is available at www.mfe.govt.nz/environmental-reporting/report-cards/air/2010/.

Soil health

The soil health report card shows how our soils are meeting target ranges for optimal production under each of five productive land uses. Just over one-third of the monitored sites under productive land uses meet all optimal production target ranges, which is an improvement from previous sampling. Sites under horticultural land use are most likely to meet all target ranges, while sites under sheep and beef land use are least likely to meet all target ranges, predominantly due to soil compaction from livestock.

The soil health report card is available at www.mfe.govt.nz/environmental-reporting/report-cards/soil-health/2010/.

Land use

The land use report card is derived directly from LUCAS data that is already available. The snapshot shows that natural forest covers about 30 per cent of New Zealand’s land area and that half of New Zealand’s land area is grassland (largely agricultural land use). Out of 30 OECD countries, New Zealand is second only to Australia in terms of the highest proportion of grassland. Between 1990 and 2008, land use changed on just under three per cent of New Zealand’s land area and was predominantly a change from grassland to new forest land.

The land use report card is available at www.mfe.govt.nz/environmental-reporting/report-cards/land-use-environmental-snapshot/2010/.

Environmental information stocktakes

Three environmental information-related stocktakes have been undertaken recently – an environmental data stocktake, an environmental indicators inventory, and a stocktake of cultural environmental monitoring.

The Environmental Domain Plan data stocktake

Statistics New Zealand is developing an Environmental Domain Plan in conjunction with the Ministry for the Environment and the Department of Conservation to assess the current state of national-scale environmental data in New Zealand, and propose initiatives for filling the gaps.

The Environmental Domain Plan will:

• identify the key enduring topic areas that need to be informed by official statistics
• undertake a data stocktake to identify the national-scale data sources that currently inform these topics
• assess the existing national-scale data and identify data gaps
• set out priorities to strengthen official statistics in the environment sector.

The key enduring topics have already been identified, and the data stocktake was completed recently and is now available on Statistics New Zealand’s website: www.stats.govt.nz/Publications/NationalAccounts/environment-domain-plan-stocktake-paper.aspx. For more on the Environmental Domain Plan see Issue 5 of Environmental Indicators Quarterly.

Environmental indicator inventory

A comprehensive inventory of environmental indicators used in New Zealand at both national and regional level (with some district-level indicators) has been undertaken for the Ministry by Anew New Zealand. This follows an action that came out of the second National Environmental Information Forum held in April 2009. The environmental indicator inventory has been transformed into a web-based searchable database that will be available soon on the Ministry’s website.

Cultural environmental monitoring stocktake

A stocktake of cultural environmental monitoring under way at a national level was recently undertaken on behalf of the Ministry by REPO Consultancy Ltd. The need for such a stocktake was identified at the third National Environmental Information Forum held in October 2009. A wananga on cultural environmental monitoring was held the day before the fourth forum to discuss the findings of the stocktake. The wananga was attended by 24 participants from tāngata whenua organisations participating in environmental monitoring and Māori staff or key personnel from central and local government agencies with responsibilities in environmental monitoring.

The cultural environmental monitoring stocktake report will be available on the Ministry for the Environment’s website soon. For more information contact Kathryn Botherway at (04) 439 7614 or kathryn.botherway@mfe.govt.nz.

National guidelines for blue-green algae

The Ministry for the Environment has published New Zealand guidelines for blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) in recreational fresh waters, jointly endorsed by the Ministry of Health. Toxic blue-green algae pose a threat to humans and animals in contact with water during recreational activities. The guidelines provide advice on how public health risk associated with cyanobacteria in recreational waters can be managed. They set out a monitoring framework for lakes (mainly planktonic cyanobacteria) and rivers (mainly benthic cyanobacteria), and are a companion to the Microbiological Water Quality Guidelines for Marine and Freshwater Recreational Areas. They have been developed to:

• help councils and health agencies develop monitoring protocols appropriate for local conditions and circumstances
• encourage the adoption of a nationally unified approach to managing cyanobacterial risk in water used for recreational purposes.

The guidelines are interim – this version has been released for trial use by monitoring and health agencies until the end of the 2011/12 summer, at which point they will be revised, based on feedback from practitioners.

To view the guidelines go to www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/water/guidelines-for-cyanobacteria/index.html. Feedback on any aspect of guideline implementation is welcomed. Please send comments to environmental.reporting@mfe.govt.nz.

Measuring and reporting on the health of New Zealand's environment

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) recently reviewed the way state of the environment reporting is carried out in New Zealand. The PCE’s report recommends that a national environmental statistics monitoring and reporting system needs to be trusted and transparent and this trust comes from three key properties:

• there needs to be some degree of independence in the reporting process
• there needs to be accountability in the process, with clear statutory requirements and responsibilities to report on the state of the environment
• the organisation(s) responsible for reporting have the technical capacity to carry out the required work.

The review confirms the need for a clearer legislative mandate around agency responsibilities to ensure objective reporting on the state of our environment. The findings of the PCE’s report, together with advice from officials from the Ministry for the Environment, will be considered by the Hon Nick Smith, Minister for the Environment when making decisions about improving the assessment of environmental performance in New Zealand.

International environmental performance comparisons

Two recent studies rank countries’ environmental performance:

2010 Environmental Performance Index

Yale University and Columbia University released the 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) earlier this year. This is the third edition of the EPI, which has been published biennially since 2006. The 2010 EPI ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators across 10 categories, including environmental health, air quality, water resource management, biodiversity and habitat, forestry, fisheries, agriculture and climate change (see below). For more about the EPI indicators and methodology, and to better understand how they derive New Zealand's scores, the EPI website includes information on the EPI framework and indicator metadata. Top ranking countries include Iceland, Switzerland and Costa Rica. New Zealand ranked 15th and Australia ranked 50th. New Zealand’s ranking has dropped since 2006 (when it ranked 1st based on 16 indicators) and 2008 (when it ranked 7th based on 25 indicators).

One reason for the drop in ranking from 7th to 15th is a fall in performance in some of the indicators (eg, environmental burden of disease, sulphur dioxide emissions, water stress index, greenhouse gas emissions per capita, and CO₂ emissions per electricity generation). Another reason for New Zealand’s falling rank is that the 2008 indicator set differs from the 2010 indicator set (although both sets contain 25 indicators).

Study ranks environmental impact of countries

A recent study led by the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute ranks the environmental impact of most of the world’s countries, based on natural forest loss, habitat conversion, marine captures, fertiliser use, water pollution, carbon emissions, and species threat. This study differs from the EPI (described above) as it does not include indicators of human health.

Countries are ranked by a proportional environmental impact index (ie, how countries perform with respect to their available resources) and an absolute environmental impact index (ie, which countries have the highest and lowest impact on a global scale).

Source: Bradshaw et al, 2010.

The 10 countries with the highest proportional environmental impact (ie, the worst performers) out of 179 countries are Singapore, Korea, Qatar, Kuwait, Japan, Thailand, Bahrain, Malaysia, Philippines and Netherlands. New Zealand had the 18th-worst rank for proportional environmental impact, due to low rankings for threatened species and fertiliser use (see below). The 10 countries with the highest absolute environmental impact out of 171 countries are Brazil, USA, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia and Peru.

When rankings were correlated against three socio-economic variables (population size, wealth – ie, gross national income – and governance quality) it was found that wealth was the most important driver of environmental impact, that is, the wealthier the country, the greater its environmental impact.

The study is published in science journal PLoS ONE and can be accessed at www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010440.

Next environmental indicator updates

The Ministry for the Environment is updating data for two national environmental indicators – freshwater quality for swimming and air quality (PM₁₀). These indicators were last reported in 2009. The two environmental report cards are due for release in July.

The New Zealand environmental indicator set for tourism

The Ministry of Tourism released a baseline environmental indicator set for tourism in early June. The set of 20 indicators has been developed under two overarching goals: monitoring visitors’ experience of New Zealand’s environment and monitoring the tourism sector’s impacts on New Zealand’s environment. This is the first such report and the data provides baseline information, which will be updated annually.

The report is available on the Ministry of Tourism’s website: www.tourism.govt.nz/Our-Work/Our-Work-Summary-page/Environmental-Indicators/

Marine monitoring programme

There is wide consensus from the marine community that there is a lack of readily accessible national-scale data on the marine environment. This affects our ability to report on the state of and trends in our marine environment.

In 2009, the Ministry of Fisheries together with the Ministry for the Environment agreed to progress the development of a coordinated marine environmental monitoring programme (MEMP) with the goal of identifying and protecting key data collection programmes.

A marine environmental monitoring programme for New Zealand was recently discussed at the fourth National Environmental Information Forum. It was suggested that an advisory group be formed to progress the MEMP further. While the group is yet to be formed and terms of reference are yet to be developed, the group could look at what marine information is currently being collected and develop a database to house and share this information.

If you are interested in being involved in the development of a marine environmental monitoring programme please contact Janine Smith at janine.smith@mfe.govt.nz.

The OECD Factbook 2010

The OECD Factbook is an annual publication from the OECD that provides an overview of major economic, social and environmental indicators. The factbook is available in a range of formats:

• the 2010 web edition has just been published
• the factbook is freely available at the iPhone app store, and can be used on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch
• a smartphone version will also be available soon.

The 2010 edition provides access to data from previous years as well as allowing the user to order the data in various ways.

More and more open data

The Ministry for the Environment is at the forefront of releasing information under non-restrictive licences. This follows the advice of the State Services Commission who developed NZGOAL – the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework, and the goals of the New Zealand Geospatial Strategy to make geospatial information and services readily discoverable and accessible. The Ministry for the Environment is using these principles to release two nationally significant spatial databases.

New Zealand Land Use Map

The Ministry has recently made the New Zealand Land Use Map 1990–2008 available online, for free and with a Creative Commons attribution licence.

The land use map is a spatial database that was created to meet New Zealand’s international reporting requirements under the Kyoto Protocol. It was created by classifying the land use classes from satellite imagery and aerial photography. The land use database contains boundaries for the land use classes, a description of the class in 2008 and what it was in 1990. This allows users to determine precisely where changes in land use occurred and what that change was.

Consumers of the data are allowed to freely use, share and distribute this database as long as they acknowledge the Crown as the copyright holder. The New Zealand Land Use Map 1990–2008 is available at www.koordinates.com or at www.mfe.govt.nz/issues/climate/lucas/data/land-use-mapping.html.

River Environment Classification

The Ministry’s New Zealand River Environment Classification (REC) will soon be available for the public to freely use, share and distribute. REC contains information about the physical characteristics for all of the 425,000 kilometres of New Zealand’s rivers, and defines the watersheds and catchments for them all. Individual river sections are categorised according to physical factors such as climate, source of flow for the river water, topography, geology, and catchment land cover. Sections of river that have similar ecological characteristics can then be grouped together, no matter where they are.

About the Creative Commons

Creative Commons licences were developed to help the distribution of creative works over the internet. A Creative Commons licence grants a user certain rights to use a work in advance, without creating any paperwork. There are six different types of licences that can be applied to a work. The least restrictive is the Attribution licence that requires the user to acknowledge the copyright holder. There are also licences that can restrict the creation of derivative products or use for non-commercial purposes. All Creative Commons licences allow works to be shared provided the licence is passed on.

More information on the licences can be found at www.creativecommons.org.nz.

ISSN 1171-4549
Published by the Ministry for the Environment, Manatu Mo Te Taiao, PO Box 10362, Wellington, New Zealand
Publication number INFO 522
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