Submission on the Natural and Built Environments Bill Exposure Draft

^{Aidan, Flickr}

It appears that the Government intends that the Natural and Built Environments Bill (NBEB) should be the flagship piece of legislation that addresses the protection of New Zealand’s environment. If this is to be the case, it must provide a measure of priority for the natural environment.

In the Commissioner's view, the natural environment is prior to the economy and society. Whatever social, cultural and economic aspirations we may have are only achievable if we have secured the biophysical systems on which life depends. To put it starkly, the economy and society are a subset of the environment.

The policies of recent decades have treated economic and social progress as being of pre-eminent importance. We have thought about the environment as something ‘external’ that provides an almost limitless flow of services, and whose underlying resources can be endlessly substituted for by other forms of capital. It is only the appearance of serious environmental stress that has aroused an awareness that there are limits to the extent to which we can claim those ‘services’ and ‘assets’.

This exposure draft has been assessed with the following question in mind: to what extent does the drafting prioritise the protection and, where appropriate, the restoration of the natural environment.

If the NBEB is to meet this objective, two clauses in particular require further work:

1. the purpose statement (clause 5) should be amended to expressly prioritise the protection and restoration of the natural environment
2. the concept of environmental limits (clause 7) should be given further substantive meaning so that the limits provide a buffer of protection for the ecological integrity of the natural environment.

Without these changes there is a risk that the NBEB becomes something of a blank canvas, with the environmental limits, environmental outcomes and national planning framework supporting whatever trade-offs between the protection and use of the natural environment the minister favours at the time.