'These are likely to be large': After years of 'raiding the environmental piggy bank', the environment is sending New Zealand invoices, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment says

Costs relating to climate adaptation have increased by $666 million, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton says.

And we can expect these costs to increase, he says - especially as “climate change exacerbates the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events”.

Upton’s comments come from his annual report for the year ending June 30, 2025.

“The 2024/25 estimate found that $3.55 billion that contributed to environmental outcomes had been budgeted by 22 central government agencies for the fiscal year,” Upton says.

“While the overall spend was similar to the previous year, spending on climate adaptation had increased significantly (by $666 million), while expenditure in other areas decreased."

In the annual report, Upton warns that climate adaptation spending is likely to increase, “particularly if New Zealand continues to take a reactive approach to this growing problem”.

Upton’s annual report follows the release of Our Marine Environment 2025 which shows as climate change and human activity puts growing pressure on New Zealand’s oceans and coasts, hundreds of thousands of homes, jobs and entire sectors are at increasing risk.

‘More complex than it needs to be’

Upton says there’s two factors that have made environmental management more complex than it needs to be: having a “fragmented, but often siloed, approach” to environmental policy and non-stop reform of environmental statutes and policy undertaken by successive governments.

“There are multiple streams of policy work for climate change, freshwater quality and biodiversity. There is uncertainty about the timing and scale of some policies as well as how different regulations interact with each other. There are often conflicts or gaps,” Upton says.

Travelling across Aotearoa, Upton says a common message he received from farmers and rural communities was “our lurching, stop-start approach to policy development is not just a significant barrier to making process on environmental outcomes, but a real turn-off for many people who want to get on with improving things”.

“With the policy landscape still up for grabs after a decade of sustained calls for action on water quality, biodiversity and climate, people are losing interest.”

But Upton says there’s widespread agreement across rural New Zealand on the major environmental challenges the country faces - these are climate change, freshwater quality, biodiversity loss, and the growing threat from pests and weeds.

Upton says while solutions to these will never be available within the three-year term of government, he is calling for cross-party consensus on environmental goals.

Having wide support for the country’s environmental management system is important, he says.

Any chance

Upton carves out three points he hopes politicians should be able to agree on “if we are to have any chance of at least maintaining, and hopefully improving, our environment”.

“The first is an understanding that our economy is a subset of the environment, not vice versa.”

“Clean air, water and soil are not only necessary to human survival, but from an economic perspective, they provide an impressive capital base on which to build our lives," he says.

But as environmental services have been freely available, Upton says they have been taken for granted.

“After years of raiding the environmental piggy bank for human progress, the environment is starting to send us invoices. These invoices are likely to be large.”

Upton points to his report on forestry, calling New Zealand’s approach to planting trees to offset carbon emissions through the Emissions Trading Scheme a “kick the pinecone down the road” approach.

“Afforestation has become the dominant action instead of reducing emissions. It is a quick, cheap fix that enables us to claim an emissions accounting triumph but at the cost of ignoring significant risks from fire, disease and extreme weather events.”

Future generations, Upton says, will face huge costs in maintaining these forests and protecting them from the impacts of climate change while the task of reducing emissions still remains.

Upton also says improvements need to be made when it comes to investing in information.

“Accessibility is a core responsibility of central government - as crucial to our nation as investment in defence or law enforcement. I have made this point many times, but as yet, little progress is evidence.”

His last point is: “While most environmental challenges are in the hard basket they don’t have to be in the too-hard basket, provided we’re honest about the timeframes and costs that tackling them require.”

“The impact of land use on biodiversity and water quality is in the hard basket. Rural people know that,” he says.

However after 15 years of “boatloads of research”, four National Policy Statements on freshwater and court cases, progress on the ground is “sporadic and lacking in direction”, Upton says.

“Finding people to blame for this will get us nowhere,” he says.

“Regional councils have in recent times become an easy target. But their problems are in no small part the result of successive governments handing down policies to the regions and leaving councils to front arguments about who bears the cost and over what timeframes.

“As a result, there are high levels of mistrust because people feel they’ve had an awful lot of environmental policy done to them.”

Upton says central and regional levels of government “must set the direction of travel” which he describes as things like environmental limits.

“Those limits are ultimately political, and elected officials have to be able to defend them.”

But local people are the ones who determine how on-the-ground action can achieve these limits, he says.

“After all, they will be the ones doing the doing, and all environmental improvement costs time and money.”

‘Doesn’t seem too much to ask’

While Upton has made these suggestions, he says “there’s not going to be an outbreak of consensus just because the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment calls for it”.

“There are always different ways of achieving things. But achieving at least a durable framework onto which we can map our disagreements and having the evidence base to make good decisions doesn’t seem too much to ask.”

“Clear-fell legislative logging may be quick and easy but leaves us constantly at square one,” Upton says.

“Meanwhile, the environmental invoices will continue to roll in.”