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The government wants to fast-track approvals of large infrastructure projects – that’s bad news for NZ’s biodiversity

News Feed
Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Getty Images/Gerald Corsi In the latest move to reform environmental laws in New Zealand, the coalition government has introduced a bill to fast-track consenting processes for projects deemed to be of national or regional significance. The Fast-track Approvals Bill, introduced under urgency on March 7, would take precedence over several current environmental laws and give ministers the power to skirt existing approval processes. Leaders of ten scientific societies that conduct biodiversity research in Aotearoa New Zealand, representing thousands of members (ourselves included), have called on the government to slow down the pace of reform. They warn that decision-making criteria are weighted towards development, not environmental protection or sustainable resource use, and undermine New Zealand’s obligations to protect the country’s unique and threatened biodiversity. New Zealand’s economy relies on the environment in many ways. One study estimated New Zealand’s land-based ecosystem services contributed NZ$57 billion to human welfare in 2012 (27% of the country’s GDP). This includes services such as crop pollination by insects, erosion control by plants and flood regulation by wetlands. The fast-track bill requires expert panels to provide recommendations to the relevant ministers within six months of a project being referred to them. This time frame is wholly unsuitable to making proper assessments of environmental impacts, including those on plants and animals, as surveys will likely be conducted at inappropriate times of the year. No time for on-site ecological assessments A key requirement of assessing impacts on biodiversity is to undertake new ecological surveys of the project site and surrounds. Such surveys identify the threatened species and ecosystems found on the site, catalogue where they are found and estimate their population numbers. This information is then used to determine how those species and ecosystems could be affected, and whether the project could be modified to avoid or mitigate these impacts. There are currently no directions in the bill for the expert panel to commission new ecological surveys. However, even if panels could do this, the six-month time frame precludes robust ecological surveys. Read more: Without a better plan, New Zealand risks sleepwalking into a biodiversity extinction crisis Thorough ecological assessments involve conducting surveys at multiple times throughout the year because certain species will only be present during particular seasons. For instance, reptiles, frogs, invertebrates and migratory species of birds are usually only detectable during warmer times of the year. Surveys for them during winter are unlikely to find these species. Even certain plants, such as orchids that can lie dormant underground as a tuber, have life cycles that make them difficult to detect. Many grasses are best identified when they are in flower. In many cases, restricting consenting to just six months means expert panels would have to make their assessments based only on existing ecological information. This is known as a “desktop assessment”. While a useful first step, these are not a replacement for on-the-ground surveys. This is particularly the case in New Zealand, where we have limited data on many species and for many parts of the country. For example, we don’t have sufficient data on most of New Zealand’s reptiles. Evidence-based decisions are critical Apart from the proposed fast-tracking of resource consents, the government has already repealed the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act. Both were enacted only last year as part of a new resource management regime. The government also plans to replace the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, which provides direction to local authorities on how to manage activities that affect the health of lakes and rivers. None of the recent and proposed changes to environmental legislation are responsive to the dual biodiversity and climate crises. They are also inconsistent with the government’s own stated goal of evidence-based decision making. Read more: Restoring ecosystems to boost biodiversity is an urgent priority – our ‘Eco-index’ can guide the way New Zealand’s plants, animals, fungi and ecosystems are globally unique. They underpin key economic sectors, especially primary production and tourism. But they are also threatened with extinction. More than 75% of New Zealand’s native species of reptile, bird, bat and freshwater fish are either threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened. New Zealand has international obligations to conserve biodiversity under the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was signed in 1993. In 2022, New Zealand joined almost 200 member nations in adopting the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which commits countries to protect 30% of land and ocean globally by 2030. Read more: Despite its green image, NZ has world's highest proportion of species at risk Much of New Zealand’s most at-risk indigenous biodiversity is found on private land and may be subject to detrimental impacts from land use and development pressures. The fast-tracking agenda threatens to undermine New Zealand’s progress on biodiversity protection and other key environmental issues. It erodes rather than sustains the natural capital on which the economy depends. New Zealand’s scientific societies are urging the coalition government to allow adequate time for appropriate parliamentary select committee processes and thorough public consultation on the bill. They call for a comprehensive legislative and policy framework, centred on the protection of environmental values and sustainable resource management, to ensure development occurs in ways that don’t further degrade natural capital. The authors thank Dr Fleur Maseyk for her comments and discussions on this piece. Tim Curran receives funding from the New Zealand Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), Fire and Emergency New Zealand, the Hellaby Grasslands Trust, Marlborough District Council, Brian Mason Scientific and Technical Trust, and the Lincoln University Argyle Trust. Tim is the Submissions Coordinator and a past President of the New Zealand Ecological Society, and coordinated and helped draft the open letter to the government referred to in this article.Jo Monks receives funding from the New Zealand Department of Conservation and Auckland Zoological Park. She is Vice President of the New Zealand Ecological Society and a council member of the Society for Research on Amphibians and Reptiles in New Zealand. Jo is a previous employee of the New Zealand Department of Conservation. Jo signed the open letter to government referred to in this article on behalf of the New Zealand Ecological Society.

New Zealand’s plants and animals are globally unique and underpin primary production and tourism. The government’s fast-tracking proposal threatens to erode the natural capital the economy relies on.

Getty Images/Gerald Corsi

In the latest move to reform environmental laws in New Zealand, the coalition government has introduced a bill to fast-track consenting processes for projects deemed to be of national or regional significance.

The Fast-track Approvals Bill, introduced under urgency on March 7, would take precedence over several current environmental laws and give ministers the power to skirt existing approval processes.

Leaders of ten scientific societies that conduct biodiversity research in Aotearoa New Zealand, representing thousands of members (ourselves included), have called on the government to slow down the pace of reform.

They warn that decision-making criteria are weighted towards development, not environmental protection or sustainable resource use, and undermine New Zealand’s obligations to protect the country’s unique and threatened biodiversity.

New Zealand’s economy relies on the environment in many ways. One study estimated New Zealand’s land-based ecosystem services contributed NZ$57 billion to human welfare in 2012 (27% of the country’s GDP). This includes services such as crop pollination by insects, erosion control by plants and flood regulation by wetlands.

The fast-track bill requires expert panels to provide recommendations to the relevant ministers within six months of a project being referred to them. This time frame is wholly unsuitable to making proper assessments of environmental impacts, including those on plants and animals, as surveys will likely be conducted at inappropriate times of the year.

No time for on-site ecological assessments

A key requirement of assessing impacts on biodiversity is to undertake new ecological surveys of the project site and surrounds. Such surveys identify the threatened species and ecosystems found on the site, catalogue where they are found and estimate their population numbers.

This information is then used to determine how those species and ecosystems could be affected, and whether the project could be modified to avoid or mitigate these impacts.

There are currently no directions in the bill for the expert panel to commission new ecological surveys. However, even if panels could do this, the six-month time frame precludes robust ecological surveys.

Read more: Without a better plan, New Zealand risks sleepwalking into a biodiversity extinction crisis

Thorough ecological assessments involve conducting surveys at multiple times throughout the year because certain species will only be present during particular seasons.

For instance, reptiles, frogs, invertebrates and migratory species of birds are usually only detectable during warmer times of the year. Surveys for them during winter are unlikely to find these species.

Even certain plants, such as orchids that can lie dormant underground as a tuber, have life cycles that make them difficult to detect. Many grasses are best identified when they are in flower.

In many cases, restricting consenting to just six months means expert panels would have to make their assessments based only on existing ecological information. This is known as a “desktop assessment”.

While a useful first step, these are not a replacement for on-the-ground surveys. This is particularly the case in New Zealand, where we have limited data on many species and for many parts of the country. For example, we don’t have sufficient data on most of New Zealand’s reptiles.

Evidence-based decisions are critical

Apart from the proposed fast-tracking of resource consents, the government has already repealed the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act. Both were enacted only last year as part of a new resource management regime.

The government also plans to replace the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, which provides direction to local authorities on how to manage activities that affect the health of lakes and rivers.

None of the recent and proposed changes to environmental legislation are responsive to the dual biodiversity and climate crises. They are also inconsistent with the government’s own stated goal of evidence-based decision making.

Read more: Restoring ecosystems to boost biodiversity is an urgent priority – our ‘Eco-index’ can guide the way

New Zealand’s plants, animals, fungi and ecosystems are globally unique. They underpin key economic sectors, especially primary production and tourism. But they are also threatened with extinction.

More than 75% of New Zealand’s native species of reptile, bird, bat and freshwater fish are either threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened.

New Zealand has international obligations to conserve biodiversity under the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was signed in 1993. In 2022, New Zealand joined almost 200 member nations in adopting the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which commits countries to protect 30% of land and ocean globally by 2030.

Read more: Despite its green image, NZ has world's highest proportion of species at risk

Much of New Zealand’s most at-risk indigenous biodiversity is found on private land and may be subject to detrimental impacts from land use and development pressures.

The fast-tracking agenda threatens to undermine New Zealand’s progress on biodiversity protection and other key environmental issues. It erodes rather than sustains the natural capital on which the economy depends.

New Zealand’s scientific societies are urging the coalition government to allow adequate time for appropriate parliamentary select committee processes and thorough public consultation on the bill.

They call for a comprehensive legislative and policy framework, centred on the protection of environmental values and sustainable resource management, to ensure development occurs in ways that don’t further degrade natural capital.

The authors thank Dr Fleur Maseyk for her comments and discussions on this piece.

The Conversation

Tim Curran receives funding from the New Zealand Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), Fire and Emergency New Zealand, the Hellaby Grasslands Trust, Marlborough District Council, Brian Mason Scientific and Technical Trust, and the Lincoln University Argyle Trust. Tim is the Submissions Coordinator and a past President of the New Zealand Ecological Society, and coordinated and helped draft the open letter to the government referred to in this article.

Jo Monks receives funding from the New Zealand Department of Conservation and Auckland Zoological Park. She is Vice President of the New Zealand Ecological Society and a council member of the Society for Research on Amphibians and Reptiles in New Zealand. Jo is a previous employee of the New Zealand Department of Conservation. Jo signed the open letter to government referred to in this article on behalf of the New Zealand Ecological Society.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Even when a country alters its output, demand for those goods may not shift as extensively, putting a ceiling on directed growth.“In most cases, the gains are not going to be enormous,” says MIT economist Arnaud Costinot, co-author of a new paper detailing the research. “They are there, but in terms of magnitude, the gains are nowhere near the full scope of the South Korean experience, which is the poster child for an industrial policy success story.”The research combines empirical data and economic theory, using data to assess “textbook” conditions where industrial policy would seem most merited.“Many think that, for countries like China, Japan, and other East Asian giants, and perhaps even the U.S., some form of industrial policy played a big role in their success stories,” says Dave Donaldson, an MIT economist and another co-author of the paper. “The question is whether the textbook argument for industrial policy fully explains those successes, and our punchline would be, no, we don’t think it can.”The paper, “The Textbook Case for Industrial Policy: Theory Meets Data,” appears in the Journal of Political Economy. The authors are Dominick Bartelme, an independent researcher; Costinot, the Ford Professor of Economics in MIT’s Department of Economics; Donaldson, the Class of 1949 Professor of Economics in MIT’s Department of Economics; and Andres Rodriguez-Clare, the Edward G. and Nancy S. Jordan Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.Reverse-engineering new insightsOpponents of industrial policy have long advocated for a more market-centered approach to economics. And yet, over the last several decades globally, even where political leaders publicly back a laissez-faire approach, many governments have still found reasons to support particular industries. Beyond that, people have long cited East Asia’s economic rise as a point in favor of industrial policy.The scholars say the “textbook case” for industrial policy is a scenario where some economic sectors are subject to external economies of scale but others are not.That means firms within an industry have an external effect on the productivity of other firms in that same industry, which could happen via the spread of knowledge.If an industry becomes both bigger and more productive, it may make cheaper goods that can be exported more competitively. The study is based on the insight that global trade statistics can tell us something important about the changes in industry-specific capacities within countries. That — combined with other metrics about national economies — allows the economists to scrutinize the overall gains deriving from those changes and to assess the possible scope of industrial policies.As Donaldson explains, “An empirical lever here is to ask: If something makes a country’s sectors bigger, do they look more productive? If so, they would start exporting more to other countries. We reverse-engineer that.”Costinot adds: “We are using that idea that if productivity is going up, that should be reflected in export patterns. The smoking gun for the existence of scale effects is that larger domestic markets go hand in hand with more exports.”Ultimately, the scholars analyzed data for 61 countries at different points in time over the last few decades, with exports for 15 manufacturing sectors included. The figure of 1.08 percent long-run GDP gains is an average, with countries realizing gains ranging from 0.59 percent to 2.06 percent annually under favorable conditions. Smaller countries that are open to trade may realize larger proportional effects as well.“We’re doing this global analysis and trying to be right on average,” Donaldson says. “It’s possible there are larger gains from industrial policy in particular settings.”The study also suggests countries have greater room to redirect economic activity, based on varying levels of productivity among industries, than they can realistically enact due to relatively fixed demand. The paper estimates that if countries could fully reallocate workers to the industry with the largest room to grow, long-run welfare gains would be as high as 12.4 percent.But that never happens. Suppose a country’s industrial policy helped one sector double in size while becoming 20 percent more productive. In theory, the government should continue to back that industry. In reality, growth would slow as markets became saturated.“That would be a pretty big scale effect,” Donaldson says. “But notice that in doubling the size of an industry, many forces would push back. Maybe consumers don’t want to consume twice as many manufactured goods. Just because there are large spillovers in productivity doesn’t mean optimally designed industrial policy has huge effects. It has to be in a world where people want those goods.”Place-based policyCostinot and Donaldson both emphasize that this study does not address all the possible factors that can be weighed either in favor of industrial policy or against it. Some governments might favor industrial policy as a way of evening out wage distributions and wealth inequality, fixing other market failures such as environmental damages or furthering strategic geopolitical goals. In the U.S., industrial policy has sometimes been viewed as a way of revitalizing recently deindustrialized areas while reskilling workers.In charting the limits on industrial policy stemming from fairly fixed demand, the study touches on still bigger issues concerning global demand and restrictions on growth of any kind. Without increasing demand, enterprise of all kinds encounters size limits.The outcome of the paper, in any case, is not necessarily a final conclusion about industrial policy, but deeper insight into its dynamics. As the authors note, the findings leave open the possibility that targeted interventions in specific sectors and specific regions could be very beneficial, when policy and trade conditions are right. Policymakers should grasp the amount of growth likely to result, however.As Costinot notes, “The conclusion is not that there is no potential gain from industrial policy, but just that the textbook case doesn’t seem to be there.” At least, not to the extent some have assumed.The research was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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Pollution

Descended: The Fight for Harris Neck

The documentary film “Descended: The Fight for Harris Neck” explores an ongoing land battle in Harris Neck, Georgia. In 1942 the U.S. war department seized 2,687 acres of land from a self-reliant community of seventy-five African American families. Since 1962 the land has been a national wildlife refuge. The film seeks to answer the pivotal question: How has a community been shaped by its common goal to reclaim their land?

Social Justice
Government
Nature

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