2026 Natural Environment Bill

(SUBMISSION PDF). February 13, 2026.

INTRODUCTION. The Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand (PSGRNZ) thanks the Environment Committee for this opportunity to contribute to scrutiny and examination of this Natural Environment Bill 234-1. We recommend that the Bill is placed on hold pending greater investigation.

The Explanatory Note of the Bill claims that this Bill will retain and strengthen core compliance and enforcement components of the RMA. These are ‘intended to prevent adverse effects and remedy harm that occurs, support information gathering to inform decision-making, enable a range of accountability mechanisms, and enable effective administration of compliance and enforcement and cost recovery.’

Yet the Bill, as drafted, lacks the substantive capacity to fulfil such a stewardship role.

The purpose of this future Natural Environment Act is to establish a framework for the use, protection and enhancement of the natural environment. Central government has a broader and more active role in shaping and overseeing the new system, yet the Ministry for the Environment lacks the powers and resourcing to adequately understand and work with other agencies to evaluate man-made (anthropogenic) chemicals and emission risks (inclusive of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs)).

The Bill’s narrow operational focus reflects legacy thinking, entrenched path dependency in regulatory design, and an unduly risk-averse approach to analytical scope. PSGRNZ recognises that Select Committees, and the data-analysis tools used to review submissions, necessarily prioritise material that engages directly with the text of the Bill. However, the matters raised in this submission, while at times appearing removed from the immediate drafting, reflect longstanding failures of governance that have produced the very conditions that earlier Regulatory Impact Statements acknowledge as problematic.

The repeated signalling of knowledge gaps, failures to require or resource scientific inquiry, and the resulting institutional ignorance in this submission document should alert the reader that these problems are historically entrenched, culturally reinforced, and not readily remedied.

The following themes are addressed in the chapters of PSGRNZ's submission (PDF) that was sent in to the Environment Select Committee:

Contents

1... NARROW OPERATIONAL FOCUS AT LOCAL, REGIONAL & CENTRAL GOVERNMENT LEVEL. 2

2... NO SCOPE IN THE BILL TO STRATEGICALLY EVALUATE ANTHROPOGENIC RISKS. 4

3... UNCERTAINTY IS CENTRAL IN RISK MANAGEMENT – THE KEY ROLE OF PRECAUTION.. 4

4... PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE DOWNGRADED AND SIDELINED.. 5

5... ABSENCE OF TECHNICAL EXPERTISE TO INFORM THE BILL. 8

6... DISCLOSURE STATEMENT – BILL TEXT CONCERNS. 8

7... NATURAL ENVIRONMENT BILL MIMICS RMA FAILURE TO SUPPORT LOCAL GOVERNMENT. 10

8... NOT ADDRESSED: SENSITIVITY OF ORGANISMS TO TOXIC RISKS. 11

9... NOT ADDRESSED: RESOURCING FOR SCIENCE, RECIPE FOR A HAMSTRUNG MINISTRY. 12

10. NOT ADDRESSED: CUMULATIVE EFFECTS: BIOACCUMULATION, PERSISTENCE, TOXICITY. 14

11. CONTAMINANT MONITORING GAP: NATIONAL POLICY STATEMENTS. 16

A PAUCITY OF RESEARCH AND EXPERTISE IN CHEMICAL CONTAMINANT SCIENCE. 18

Chapter 1. NARROW OPERATIONAL FOCUS AT LOCAL, REGIONAL & CENTRAL GOVERNMENT LEVEL

1.1. The Bill’s design is fundamentally deficient. It lacks any clear, principled framework for inquiry or exploratory research and provides no credible mechanism to ensure equity or burden-sharing when environmental limits tighten or when cumulative effects emerge belatedly, as they often do.

1.2. There is no decision-making pathway/hierarchy to judge decision-making between economic efficiency and health protection when the information is uncertain and contested, or where there is missing data.

1.3. ‘Best obtainable information’ is narrowly presumed, and does not extend to an obligation for the Ministry for the Environment to evaluate the scientific literature and undertake an assessment of the state of scientific knowledge concerning an issue, before the Ministry would recommend, make or approve a national instrument and set national standards. This includes any requirement that monitoring frameworks would be in alignment with best global practice, and which would reflect the capacities of new instrumentation including machine learning.

1.4. The drafting demonstrates little engagement with contemporary scientific understanding of ecosystems, environmental pollution, or the scale and complexity of modern risk. It is notably disconnected from advances in scientific capability, including systems modelling, machine learning, and data integration, that could materially improve the identification, interpretation, and governance of environmental hazards. As a result, the legislation is not merely inadequate for the future; it is already out of step with present scientific reality.

1.5. International pollution treaties are sector specific and historically defined. They do not extend to most modern agricultural and industrial emission of concern and do not supply general principles for assessing new or complex emission risks. In effect, any reliance on treaty implementation will and can not cure the Bills evidential gaps that are discussed in PSGRNZ’s response.

1.6. The functions and powers of the Minister and the Ministry for the Environment are decoupled from the capacity to undertake in-depth scientific research for the purpose of the undertaking its functions and powers, outlined in the image below, because there is no explicit directive in the Bill for scientific research and the corresponding funding which is required to be ring-fenced for such purposes over the long term.

1.7. The Bill fails to create an authorising environment for anticipatory governance. There is no language requiring horizon scanning by officials at local, regional and central government so as to ensure that the scientific information they rely on is scientifically up to date in the year that they are working.

1.8. The Bill does not impose an obligation to invest in long-term scientific capacity, and there is no provision for developing sustained expertise in national and regionally specific pollutants and their risk and degradation routes within agencies, communities, or tāngata whenua that would support informed governance across all tiers. Instead, the Bill underspecifies any duty to inquire, effectively entrenching structural disincentives to exploratory analysis and reinforcing institutional conservatism.

1.9. Many anthropogenic pollutants exhibit environmental persistence, with degradation governed by compound-specific physicochemical properties and context-dependent biotic and abiotic processes. Substances may partition between aqueous phases, sediments, and soils, with sorption, resuspension, and long-range transport influencing spatial and temporal exposure profiles. Persistence is frequently coupled with bioaccumulation and trophic transfer, leading to biomagnification in higher-order organisms. Degradation pathways, photolytic, hydrolytic, microbial, or oxidative, can yield transformation products with distinct and, in some cases, greater toxicological relevance than parent compounds. These processes are further modulated by cofactors such as redox conditions, temperature, organic matter content, microbial community structure, and interactions with co-occurring contaminants. Consequently, robust risk assessment requires integrated consideration of environmental pathways, transformation dynamics, and system-level interactions rather than single-compound or static exposure assumptions.

1.10. For decades, local, regional and central government decision-makers have not had the scientific expertise to evaluate the potential for toxic, persistent and bioaccumulative contaminants to cause harm to ecosystems over time, including particularly – as a cumulative adverse effect.

1.11. Another point of concern regards the Disclosure Statement which frames the system as a ‘funnel’ of tightly defined goals, producing national instruments and resulting in one combined plan per region. This is aimed at ensuring consistency and while reducing risk for ‘relitigation’.

1.12. The Bill (and disclosure statement) claims that a goal of the Bill is to:

‘manage the effects of natural hazards associated with the use and protection of natural resources through proportionate, risk-based planning’.. That [13] ‘A person exercising or performing functions, powers or duties under this Act must take all practicable steps to act in a timely and cost-effective manner: act proportionately to the scale and significance of the matter, ensure they have enough information to understand the implications of their decision (if any), after considering—

the cost and feasibility of obtaining the information; and
the scale and significance of the matter to which the decision relates

The scale and significance of environmental risks cannot be adequately understood on the basis of the current knowledge base held by the Environmental Protection Authority, the Ministry for the Environment, New Zealand research institutes, or academic institutions.

Natural Environment Bill, Government Bill 234—1. Explanatory note. General policy statement.

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