Our environment 2025

Our environment 2025 is the latest three-yearly state of the environment report produced by the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ under the Environmental Reporting Act 2015.

It is known as a synthesis report – it brings together key findings from the regular six-monthly reports that cycle the five domains of air, freshwater, marine, atmosphere and climate, and land. The last synthesis report released was Environment Aotearoa 2022. Where previous synthesis reports have been named Environment Aotearoa, this report has been intentionally named Our environment 2025 to align with the naming of domain reports (eg, Our air, Our freshwater).

Our environment 2025 provides a picture of the whole environment and its interconnections, showing how changes to different parts of the environment impact on each other.

The environment includes people. Our lives and livelihoods are intertwined with environmental systems and processes in countless complex ways. Human actions are responsible for driving changes in the state of the environment, and our lives are also affected by those changes.

Effective decision-making about the environment relies on an accurate and accessible knowledge base. The purpose of the report is to provide high-quality information about how and why our environment is changing, and the resulting impacts. Evaluating specific policies and advice on responses to environmental issues is out of scope for environmental reports under the Environmental Reporting Act 2015, and therefore they are not discussed here.