Sustainable Development: Environment and eco-system resilience
People are a part of nature. When we don’t live within its limits, things can go wrong. For example, poor land-use practices may result in reduced soil and water quality. Burning of fossil fuels is widely considered to contribute to increased global warming effects (potentially affecting people’s health and well-being). Ultimately the social and economic benefits we gain from environmental quality depend on our ability to live in an environmentally sustainable way.
People today are recognising the need to sustain the life-supporting capacity of the Earth’s ecosystems. Ecosystems are communities of plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms that interact with each other and their physical environments. The ability of an environment to tolerate pressures and maintain its life-supporting capacity can be called ecosystem resilience.
Ecosystem resilience is a complex concept, and while there is no agreement internationally on how it might best be measured, we do have a range of environmental indicators to report whether ecosystems and environments are coping with pressures or are degrading over time. Environmental indicators report on the pressures on, or condition of, particular aspects of the environment. Over time, these indicators provide a gauge of the current maintenance or depletion of natural and physical resources.
This section presents indicators that tell us something about the state of New Zealand’s environment and ecosystems - how well they are faring in terms of their condition, the pressures they are subjected to, and their ability to support human consumption and resource use.
| Topics
| Sustainable development indicators
| Contextual discussion
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| Atmosphere
| Greenhouse gases
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| Ozone
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| Ambient air quality
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| Land
| | New Zealand land cover
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| Oceans, seas and coasts
| Coastal water quality
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| Fish stocks
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| Fresh water
| River water quality
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| Quality of drinking water
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| Biodiversity
| Percentage loss of indigenous vegetation by environment
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| Change in the distribution of the little spotted kiwi
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| Biosecurity
| | Biosecurity
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How is environment and ecosystem resilience relevant to sustainable development?
Ecosystem resilience is an integral part of sustainable development for numerous economic, social and cultural reasons. New Zealand’s economy is highly dependent on its agriculture, horticulture, forestry, fishing and tourism industries. All of these industries require natural and physical resources - including the ecosystem services and functions that support human and economic activity. For example, climate and water regulation, soil formation, waste treatment, biological control of pests, and pollination. These ‘ecosystem services’ contribute directly to production and consumption in the market economy, but they come under pressure from economic and social activities.
The maintenance of acceptable living standards relies on ecosystem resilience and ecosystem services. We also derive indirect and passive values from ecosystems such as the services and existence of biodiversity. Biodiversity simply means the variety of all life, both indigenous and introduced, including plants and animals of all sizes and shapes, and the places (ecosystems and environments) in which they live. Maintaining biodiversity helps maintain ecosystem resilience.
In the New Zealand context, there is a Mäori cultural dimension to environmental and economic resilience. In Mäori culture, all things have a mauri - a life force. Damage to this mauri, or human attempts to dominate it, result in the mauri losing its energy and vitality. Any loss of mauri affects the lives of people themselves as well as the resilience of ecosystems. Maintaining the mauri of the environment and ecosystem resilience are equally important for sustainable development. While the indicators presented in this chapter do not provide a measure of ecosystem resilience or mauri, they do show conditions or trends in aspects of the environment that are important for sustainable development.
Current situation and trends
Atmosphere
Land
Oceans, seas and coasts
Fresh water
Biodiversity
Biosecurity
What are the differences within New Zealand?
The paucity of nationally representative environmental data in New Zealand makes it difficult to talk about regional differences. Nationally representative data can provide a picture of the whole country. Data would be collected using standardised monitoring methods and monitoring networks (a series of monitoring sites) that have been designed to be statistically robust. (See the following section: Data gaps or issues). Although there is a lack of data that provides information on the same aspects of the environment consistently around the country, the indicators show:
- Air pollution from home-heating fires is a problem in some areas
- Air quality is deteriorating on some busy urban roads
- The North Island has considerably more land in pasture than the South Island and over twice the area of urban land use, urban open space and planted exotic forests
- 35 percent of modelled fish stocks are below their target level and have rebuilding strategies in place
- While fresh water quality is good in upper river catchments, water quality in lower catchments is variable depending on river type, surrounding land use and management
- New Zealand’s full range of environments and ecosystems are not represented in its protected areas network
- The little spotted kiwi are now extinct in most regions
- Seizures of unwanted pests (plants and animals) from aircraft and aircraft passengers have steadily increased since 1995.
Factors influencing change
Sustainable development is affected by population change and by the level and nature of production and consumption, ie our use of natural resources (renewable and non-renewable) and the rate at which we consume (or deplete) these and generate waste. How New Zealand’s economy develops over time will influence environment and ecosystem resilience, eg intensification or diversification of agriculture and industry, increased tourism, technology and innovation, regional development and urbanisation.
Education and changing social attitudes are likely to affect the way New Zealanders impact on the physical environment and affect ecosystem resilience. How New Zealand’s landscape is further modified is a significant issue. For example, some communities are investing in restoration programmes, trying to return indigenous biodiversity to depleted areas or local reserves. Hillsides that can no longer support pasture and grazing because of soil erosion are being planted for forestry or allowed to revert to scrub to begin a cycle of native forest regeneration. River margins in pastoral landscapes are beginning to be managed in a different way to better manage water quality. Public transport can be a way to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution. Overall, awareness of human impact on environment and ecosystem services is beginning to be considered in personal behaviour, policy and management decisions.
Sustainable development requires a modified approach to the use of renewable but depletable resources (eg forests, groundwater aquifers, fish stocks and soils) and the use of non-depletable resources that can be degraded by pollution (eg air, water and land). Such an approach looks to ensure that the rate of consumption or depletion is at or below the rate of replenishment, so that these resources continue to be available. This may be able to be achieved through: more efficient production and consumption that allows for economic growth without depleting the natural resources that such production depends on; reducing or eliminating waste by changing the mix of natural resource consumption; and using resources more efficiently. In those ways, economic growth can be sustained without eroding essential natural resource stocks and environmental quality.
Decisions about the use of non-renewable resources are inevitably economic and political. These are factors highlighted in chapter 5: Economic Growth and Innovation.
Data gaps or issues
Although a considerable amount of environmental data and information exists in New Zealand, it can be of limited value. It is often out of date, confined to one particular time period or location, gathered using different methods in different areas, or not able to be interpreted (or non-existent) in relation to a current environmental issue or framework (eg the Pressure-State-Response model or the capital approach framework for sustainable development used in this report). Fresh water quality data and information are a good example. Limited data are available to report on water quality nationally across all river types and for all New Zealand lakes. While national databases such as the National River Water Quality Network exist and most regional councils have collected data for 10-20 years, the lack of standardised methods and a representative monitoring network has meant it is difficult to report on New Zealand’s fresh water quality overall. The same can be said for some of the data used to report indicators in this chapter, as well as for indicators we are not yet able to report, such as fresh water quantity. Points of note are:
- The air quality data is only representative of the sites monitored and not of New Zealand as a whole.
- In the past, changes in New Zealand’s land cover have been modelled or estimated. The Land Cover Database, a representative measure of land cover nationally, is recent with 1996/97 being the first year for monitoring.
- The beach water quality data is only representative of the beach sites monitored and not of New Zealand as a whole.
- The fish stock assessment models mathematically integrate data and information from many different sources to make the best estimate of the current state of the stock.
- While the distribution of many indigenous species is known, there is limited data about the abundance of such species, eg kiwi.
- While the distribution of many animal pests and weeds is known, there is little data about their abundance.
Since 1996, the Ministry for the Environment has been addressing the data gap issue through the development of a core set of environmental performance indicators (including fresh water indicators) using the OECD’s Pressure-State-Response framework (see www.environment.govt.nz). At the same time, the Ministry has been working with scientists and resource managers to standardise monitoring methods and develop a set of environment-based classification systems that can be used to interpret indicator data consistently across the whole country (eg River Environment Classification and Land Environments of New Zealand). The indicators presented in this report are a direct result of this work.
Environmental accounting is underway in New Zealand. Statistics New Zealand is currently developing national natural resource accounts for New Zealand and regional environmental accounts have been partly developed under funding from the Ministry for the Environment.
More nationally representative data will be available in the next two to five years as the core set of indicators is implemented along with the classification systems. Unlike the array of economic indicators and progress reports that regularly chart the state of the economy, reporting on the state of the environment or ecological sustainability using quantitative data is more recent. Work to establish long-term ecological monitoring in New Zealand is still needed before overall environmental trends can be reported regularly. The Ministry’s work addresses the data gap issue in part.
Monitoring Progress Towards a Sustainable New Zealand
Atmosphere
Land
Oceans, seas and coasts
Fresh water
Biodiversity
Biosecurity
References and further information
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This page last modified on: 08 March 2004