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MARTIN DE RUYTER/STUFF
Volunteers clean up after a storm on Tahunanui Beach in Nelson. The country’s environment relies on such efforts, but they could be far more effective if councils played a bigger part in sharing vital information, argues Rachel Devine.
Rachel Devine is an independent strategic adviser and a former environmental law partner at MinterEllisonRuddWatts.
OPINION: When was the last time you picked up a piece of rubbish off the beach, planted a tree that wasn’t for your own benefit, or set a trap in the hope of catching a predator?
Maybe you do these things regularly. Maybe you’re one of the incredible people we are celebrating this Volunteer Week – someone who goes above and beyond to ease the stress we humans cause the world around us.
But why is it the few and not the masses doing this work? We need to do a better job of engaging whole communities and arming them with the right tools. Imagine what we could achieve together.
Right now most of us are in the dark about what is happening in our local environment. That needs to change if we are going to get people off the couch.
We need to make sure that data held by councils is easily accessible to the public, which will help everyone to participate in caring for the places we love.
Chris Skelton/STUFF
Volunteers pick up rubbish in Fox River on the West Coast after a flood ripped open the old Fox Glacier landfill in March 2019.
Have you ever wondered what type of housing a developer has resource consent to build down the street? What is being discharged into the local stream? How many companies in the neighbouring area are authorised to release pollutants into the air? Where the nearby contaminated sites are?
All of this information is public information. Unfortunately, the way local councils disclose consent information doesn’t work the same for everyone.
The steady stream of monitoring data that proves consent holders are complying with discharge limits in environmentally sensitive areas is only released by a council upon request.
It certainly doesn’t work for the family who lives by an industrial area and wonders if that is what is exacerbating their health problems.
It doesn’t work for kaitiaki who want to know if the manufacturing plant discharging chemicals in a river near a marae is meeting its consent conditions.
Martin de Ruyter
Councils hold large amounts of data and other information on pollution and environmental conditions, but they typically don’t make it easy to access, argues Rachel Devine.
Easy public access to this information hasn’t been a priority for previous governments, and as a result, freely obtaining environmental data via a council’s bureaucratic channels is difficult, even though access to this data is a public right.
Currently, there are no national standards or guidelines for environmental data collection or storage.
Best results often require assistance from someone experienced in council processes, sometimes there’s a fee involved, and often, plenty of patience and persistence is required just to retrieve a small amount of (perhaps impenetrable) raw data.
Put another way, consent information is, for all intents and purposes, hidden away, accessible only to a select few; a locked box to which only local government holds the key.
Consequently, public access to – and use of – this environmental data is limited, and ultimately, New Zealand communities are shut out from the very decisions that affect them most.
Right now we’re spending time and money to fix a very broken Resource Management Act.
Unknown/Supplied
Environmental lawyer Rachel Devine: We should build open-data principles into the law, to make local councils proactively release data about the state of their environment.
We should use this opportunity to build open-data principles into the law, to make local councils proactively release data, and to include a deadline for them to work to make sure it happens.
Along with a nationally-consistent approach to environmental data gathering and sharing, such a change could radically transform how the public interacts with local decision-making processes, bringing New Zealand into line with international best practices, and helping create an informed, vigilant public watchdog for the local spaces we love.
Transparency is more powerful than regulation. After all, it’s often the public who first speaks up for our environment when something is going wrong. That can’t happen without timely, accurate, useful local environmental data.
Let’s insist that our lawmakers create an open data framework for local council consent information to clear the way to a stronger, more citizen-led – and likely more vigilant – approach to local environmental compliance and monitoring.
It’s well-past time we all mucked in, but we first need to empower communities to own the work of caring for their local environment.
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