Govt employs one person on air quality despite 3,000 yearly deaths
6 June 2024
Marc Daalder (newsroom)
Air quality rules written 19 years ago place no limits on what we now know are the two most dangerous pollutants
Nearly three years after the World Health Organisation warned air pollution levels previously thought safe were actually harmful to human health, the Ministry for the Environment still has only one staff member working on updating limits in New Zealand.
Data obtained under the Official Information Act reveals staffing levels on air quality work at the environment ministry were 0.5 full-time equivalents when the WHO warning was released, rising to 0.8 the next year and now sitting at one.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Simon Upton, told Newsroom the findings reinforce his view that resourcing within the ministry is “remarkably low for what is a major environmental domain” and that officials do not view air quality as an important environmental issue.
In correspondence with then-environment minister David Parker last year and the current minister Penny Simmonds, Upton highlighted a 2022 study that found more than 3000 deaths each year can be linked to air pollution – one in every 10 deaths nationwide.
“We estimated that human-generated air pollution contributed to the premature deaths of more than 3300 adult New Zealanders, over 13,100 hospital admissions, approximately 13,200 cases of childhood asthma and nearly 1.75 million restricted activity days in 2016,” Gerda Kuschel, one of the authors of that Health and Air Pollution in New Zealand 3.0 (HAPINZ 3.0) study said.
“At the time of its release the impacts were valued at $15.6 billion. Since then, the government has revised the impact costs – especially the value of a statistical life – and the HAPINZ 3.0 impacts would now be valued 2.5 times higher – coming in at closer to $38.8 billion. Both the HAPINZ findings and the release of the latest WHO guidelines in 2021 show that even low levels of air pollution (much lower than previously suspected) cause significant impacts.”
New Zealand’s current air quality regulations – the National Environmental Standards for Air Quality or NES-AQ – were written nearly two decades ago, in 2005. They were last updated in 2011 and don’t directly limit emissions of what we now know are the two most dangerous pollutants: particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5) and nitrogen oxides (NOx).
While Parker acknowledged last year the regulations were out of date, Upton told Simmonds: “I was surprised and disappointed that rather than committing to updating the NES-AQ as soon as possible, your predecessor stated that further analysis is needed. I first raised these issues with ministers in December 2021. There has been ample time for analysis. We should now be ready to act.”
At the time of his earlier correspondence, Upton said he was surprised to learn that “oversight for air quality rests with a single person for whom it is not even their sole responsibility”.
“I know resources within departments are tight, but one or two people in MfE, for what is one of the five key environmental domains, seems wholly insufficient,” he wrote to Simmonds later.
In reply, Simmonds said she was awaiting advice from Ministry for the Environment officials about the “attainability” of the safe limits prescribed by the World Health Organisation.
The data released to Newsroom shows there were more officials working on air quality when the previous government consulted on new rules in early 2020.
The decision was then made to wait for the WHO recommendations, but Kuschel said “surprisingly little progress has been made” since those were released.
In a statement to Newsroom, a spokesperson for Simmonds said further work had been delayed because of the resourcing requirements of Labour’s Resource Management Act reforms. The minister’s office couldn’t give a guarantee that the issue would receive more attention under the coalition Government, however, saying instead that she “will make decisions about the priority of this work after receiving further advice from ministry officials and in the context of the work programme prioritisation exercise that will follow the release of Budget 2024”.
There are officials working on air quality issues in other departments, such as the Ministry of Transport, but it is the environment ministry that is responsible for the nationwide regulations limiting air pollution, which are then implemented and enforced by regional councils.
Green Party environment spokesperson Lan Pham, herself a former regional councillor, said the lack of staffing meant the issue wasn’t a priority for the ministry.
“I find it disappointing but unfortunately not surprising that there is that reflection in terms of our priorities of what really matters in this country. We have been taking our environment for granted but the overwhelming evidence shows it is to our own detriment,” she said.
“The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has found only 2 percent of total government expenditure actually goes towards environmental outcomes. What we’re seeing with this Government is that they’ve got this hugely narrow, outdated view of economics where it’s all about cost savings. When actually, what we’re seeing is that the health implications of us not investing in environmental protection means that ultimately society and taxpayers are picking up astronomically more cost.”
Asthma and Respiratory Foundation medical director Bob Hancox agreed that the Ministry for the Environment appeared to have deprioritised air pollution work.
“It does seem a very, very low number of people to be involved in this on a policy stance [at the Ministry for the Environment] for what is one of our major environmental health problems. To only have one, or most of the time actually less than one person involved in it just seems very, very low,” he said.
Citing the deaths and hospitalisations attributed to air pollution by the HAPINZ study, Hancox said it was clear that air quality was one of the major environmental contributors to respiratory health.
“I suppose for context, that’s nearly three times the road toll. It’s a huge problem. These people won’t be visible. It’s a hidden killer. You don’t go to the doctor or hospital and get diagnosed with a disease caused by air pollution because it’s almost impossible for an individual or your doctor to identify when your disease or your symptoms have been made worse because of what you’re breathing in,” he said.
“The only way that we can pick this up is when we realise that people who are exposed to air pollution have a much higher likelihood of having these diseases. In a way, it’s a silent killer but it’s clearly very important to our health to be breathing clean air.”
