Drilling for oil and gas in New Zealand: environmental oversight and regulation

This report analyses the complex system of laws, agencies, and processes that regulate New Zealand\u27s oil and gas industry. Introduction In part due to the technique of hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’, more wells are being drilled in Taranaki and the amount of gas and oil extracted in the region is rising. As in many other countries, there has been considerable opposition to fracking in New Zealand - the report deals  with the whole process of drilling for oil and gas, from choosing a well site right through to the abandonment of the well

Changing climate and rising seas: understanding the science

An investigation of what is causing climate change and one of its major impacts – the rising level of the sea. Introduction The level of the sea is constantly changing everywhere on Earth as tides rise and fall in predictable patterns. Both the timing and height of high tides are forecast accurately because they depend on the relative positions of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. However, tides are just variations on average water levels – they are not changes in average water levels. Less widely understood is that sea levels have changed much more dramatically in the past as the Earth has moved in and out of ice ages. In cold periods the sea has been low and in warm periods the sea has been high. Thus the sea has risen and fallen by over a hundred metres many times in the history of the Earth. But over the last few thousand years the climate has been relatively stable and the sea level has varied only a little. However, since about 1900, sea levels have risen by about 20 centimetres. There is a strong consensus among scientists that rising sea levels are largely a consequence of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere raising global temperatures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently expects sea level to rise a further 30 to 100 centimetres by 2100, and to continue rising for several centuries.5 How much the sea actually rises by 2100 and beyond will depend on what action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades. Three processes drive this rise in sea level – seawater expands as it warms, glaciers melt and retreat, and ice sheets shrink. Although expanding seawater and melting glaciers can be modelled with high confidence, there are still big questions around how the massive ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland will react. Sea level rise is not the only consequence of a warming world, but it is a particularly sobering one since many millions live just above the high tide mark.6 New Zealanders are not as vulnerable as those who live on low-lying islands and in river deltas, but as a coastal nation the impact on our beaches, buildings, roads and other infrastructure, and on our communities will be considerable

Risky spaces: Creating, contesting and communicating lines on environmental hazard maps

This paper examines the tensions involved in the production, presentation and revision of hazard maps, focusing on the controversies that have become increasingly common when they are used to change government policy. Our scope includes all the major environmental hazards currently being mapped in New Zealand, one of the world's most exposed and hazard‐aware countries. Selecting one country also allowed a multi‐hazard approach to be taken that helps provide messages for other countries. Drawing on interviews with 24 key informants, the paper identifies a range of reasons for explaining the recent growth in hazard mapping and why hazard maps sometimes resulted in high‐profile controversies. Two themes emerged out of this analysis: an inconsistency in modelling and mapping hazards that created opportunity for challenge and the selective mobilisation of scientific uncertainty to dispute the legitimacy of official maps, particularly on developed land. The findings highlight the multiple roles of mapping, positioning maps as potentially instruments of both depoliticisation and repoliticisation. We emphasise how conflicts are most likely when maps are used as technocratic instruments of depoliticisation, and that creating maps in a more open way can generate valuable opportunities to engage with communities in more creative policy‐making regarding the threats they face and how they can respond. Mapping processes that open up the space for critical debate can act as important debate‐support tools as well as decision‐support tools, particularly when used to give voice to those not normally heard or treated as equal

Pathways to sustainable landscape management: peer recognition as an indicator of effective ‘soft’ actions

New Zealand is a food producer and exporter that combines neoliberal policy with performance-based environmental management, using ‘soft’ governance and actions where possible. Voluntary environmental farm awards are analysed to identify the landscape management activities recognised as best practice by peers at a farm level. Results highlight the importance of whole farm system management. However, the efficacy of reliance upon voluntary mechanisms is coming under increasingly critical scrutiny, as environmental conditions in intensive agricultural landscapes continue to decline. The research question this poses is whether whole farm plans can be practically and formally connected in three concurrent ways – to supply chain management, and to statutory planning frameworks and environmental regulations and to local landscape co-management – while still maintaining flexibility of action for the farmer