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1 Introduction

State of the environment (SoE) reporting is an important means of providing environmental information. Its key function is to communicate accurate, timely, and accessible information about the condition of the environment to people in central and local government, businesses, iwi, and communities who make decisions about natural resource use and management.

Under the Environment Act 1986, the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) is required to “solicit and obtain information from any source, and to conduct and supervise research, so far as it is necessary for the formulation of advice to the Government on environmental policies” (section 31(b)).

In large part, the Ministry meets its obligations in this respect through its national environmental reporting programme. The programme was established in 2006 to communicate accurate, timely and accessible national-scale information about the condition of the New Zealand environment.

Notwithstanding decisions to be taken on the future environmental architecture in New Zealand, the Ministry’s environmental statistics programme is presently scheduled to deliver an indicator-based state of the environment (SoE) report every five years. In the interim, the programme will produce regular (in many cases, annual) updates of indicator information, as well as other occasional reports, to generate regular snapshots of the state of and pressures on the New Zealand environment.

To date, the national environmental reporting programme has produced a number of national-scale environmental reports, surveys and national monitoring data-sets. It has also produced Environment New Zealand 2007, New Zealand’s second comprehensive national-scale SoE report and the first to use a core set of national environmental indicators to report on 10 key environmental domains (consumption, transport, energy, waste, air, atmosphere, land, fresh water, oceans, and biodiversity).

It is important to note that the Environment New Zealand 2007 report included comprehensive information on the core set of national environmental indicators and variables. This included background information on the environmental, health, social and/or economic impacts of the indicator/variable under discussion, why it was important to measure, and what information the indicator provided to decision-makers. The limitations of each indicator/variable were also discussed in the report.

The present report aims to avoid duplication of information contained within Environment New Zealand 2007. As such, it should be read in conjunction with that report.

 

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