A charter for the living commons

Take out the part of the Bill that orders the people who look after national parks to put making money first on land that exists to protect nature.

A statutory “economic-development purpose” reorders the decision hierarchy on the conservation estate: it makes development a lawful, weighable objective for officials rather than a guarded exception, and even after the explicit sale clauses were dropped it keeps a legal route by which land can still be alienated. Striking it restores conservation as the estate’s paramount purpose rather than one interest balanced against growth.

• Dasgupta Review — The Review’s founding framing that the economy is embedded within nature, not above it — so nature must not be structurally subordinated to growth; treating the biosphere as a free input is the institutional failure that drives its depletion.
• Carol M. Rose — Her account of inherently public property — resources whose worth comes from staying open to all rather than being enclosed — identifies the conservation estate as exactly the kind of land the law should resist subordinating to private gain.

Evidence — Department of Conservation’s assessment that the public conservation estate generates about NZ$3.4 billion a year in tourism value — the asset a development-first reordering puts at risk.

Put the ban on selling protected land directly into the law itself, so a future minister cannot quietly undo it.

A ministerial undertaking is reversible by the next minister at no legislative cost; entrenching non-alienation in primary legislation raises the bar for reversal to a full parliamentary process under public scrutiny. This is the durability logic behind Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations Act — long-term duties survive electoral turnover only when they are statutory, not discretionary.

• Edith Brown Weiss — Her principle of intergenerational equity: each generation holds the natural inheritance in trust and must pass it on undiminished — the basis for writing inalienability into the Act itself rather than leaving it to ministerial goodwill.
• Wales — Well-being of Future Generations Act — The precedent that long-term stewardship duties only bind future governments when written into primary statute with their own accountability, rather than left to the goodwill of the government of the day.

Update the 1987 conservation law under one rule: any change must protect nature more, never less.

A non-regression clause makes reform one-directional — it permits modernisation while legally foreclosing rollback. This is exactly the principle the IUCN World Declaration on the Environmental Rule of Law sets out as Principle 12 (states “shall not allow or pursue” reductions in protection), and which France and the EU have written into statute. It answers the “the Act is outdated” objection without opening a door to weaker protection.

• International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — The World Declaration on the Environmental Rule of Law (adopted 2016), Principles 12–13 — non-regression and progression: environmental protections must never be lowered (Principle 12) and should be revised and enhanced over time (Principle 13), so reform can only ratchet the floor upward.
• Michel Prieur — The jurist who defined the principle of non-regression: environmental law may be modernised and amended but never weakened below the protection already achieved — exactly the one-directional test this writes into the 1987 Act.

Keep, rather than shrink, the law’s existing duty to honour Treaty of Waitangi promises to Māori in how conservation land is governed.

Section 4 of the Conservation Act requires the whole Act to be interpreted to give effect to Treaty principles; narrowing it would weaken iwi standing precisely where Crown–iwi co-governance of the estate is most developed. Maintaining it tracks Ostrom’s finding that durable commons depend on those affected sharing in the rules, and aligns with Treasury’s own He Ara Waiora framework for Māori wellbeing.

• Jacinta Ruru and colleagues — New Zealand legal scholarship arguing conservation law should more fully empower hapū and iwi leadership and honour Treaty obligations in governing the estate — the case for keeping, and strengthening, the section 4 duty rather than narrowing it.
• New Zealand Treasury — He Ara Waiora — Treasury’s te-ao-Māori relational wellbeing framework, which treats the Crown–Māori relationship and kaitiakitanga (guardianship) as foundations of long-term wellbeing — the official basis for keeping, not narrowing, the section 4 duty.

Lock the visitor-levy and park-fee money for running the parks into a fund set by law, so the parks are never sold off just to afford the parks.

This builds a provisioning institution: a beneficiary-pays revenue stream — tourists who use the commons — statutorily matched to the cost of maintaining it and insulated from the annual Budget contest. It removes the structural driver (chronic under-funding) that converts “the estate doesn’t pay its way” into pressure to alienate land that already earns around NZ$3.4 billion a year in tourism.

• Sven Wunder — His canonical account of payments for ecosystem services on a user-pays basis — those who benefit from a natural service pay to sustain it — the principle behind charging the visitors who use the estate and channelling that revenue into its upkeep.
• Earth4All / Club of Rome — Its Citizens Fund / fee-dividend on the commons proposal — charge for access to common goods and channel the revenue into a ring-fenced fund managed at arm’s length from government, so the value of shared assets is captured for, and reinvested in, those assets.

Evidence — The International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy already exists and is explicitly part-allocated to conservation — the live revenue stream this action would ring-fence by statute.

Where Māori want it, give a forest or river its own legal standing and guardians chosen by Māori and the Crown together, so it cannot be sold without the guardians’ agreement — and protecting it is their entire job.

Legal personhood replaces a reversible policy with a standing institutional guardian whose statutory purpose is protection: alienating the land then requires the guardian’s consent rather than a ministerial signature. New Zealand pioneered this with Te Urewera (2014) and Te Awa Tupua / the Whanganui River (2017), giving the idea that nature can hold rights exercised through appointed guardians a working legal form the rest of the world now cites.

• New Zealand — Te Urewera Act 2014 & Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 — The two statutes that vested legal personhood in a former national park and a river, governed by joint Crown–iwi guardian boards whose sole mandate is the place’s long-term health — the precedent for making protection self-enforcing and effectively inalienable.
• Christopher D. Stone — His 1972 argument in “Should Trees Have Standing?” that natural objects should hold legal rights exercised on their behalf by appointed guardians — the intellectual origin of nature’s legal personhood now realised in New Zealand law.
• Catherine Iorns Magallanes — Her analysis of the Whanganui River and Te Urewera as legal persons, grounded in the te-ao-Māori view of nature as an ancestor owed guardianship — the jurisprudence that turned Stone’s abstract proposal into working New Zealand law.

Evidence — The Te Urewera Act 2014 itself — granting Te Urewera legal personality with all the rights of a legal person, governed by a board, demonstrating the mechanism in enacted law.

Give the sea the same care as the land: pass a modern marine-protection law, put 30% of the ocean on a real path to protection by 2030, and stop dragging trawl nets over underwater mountains.

New Zealand’s ocean estate is about 4.2 million square kilometres — one of the largest on Earth — yet just over 0.4% sits in fully protected no-take reserves, and the seabed closures that do exist are fisheries rules, not marine protection. A dedicated Marine Protected Areas Act — promised and shelved by successive governments — is the missing legal machinery for the 30-by-30 target New Zealand signed, and a seamount trawl ban protects the slowest-growing habitats in the estate. The Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Act of 2025 shows the politics can still pass.

• Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework — Target 3 — The 30-by-30 commitment New Zealand has already signed — 30% of land and sea effectively conserved by 2030 — against which 0.4% full marine protection measures the gap.
• Environmental Defence Society — Its 2025 review finds New Zealand’s marine protection far behind international best practice, and urges the long-promised Marine Protected Areas Act as the essential first step.

Evidence — The Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Act 2025 — in force October 2025 — added twelve high-protection areas and extended two marine reserves, lifting the Gulf’s protected share from roughly 6% to 18%: proof marine protection can still pass.

Keep the promise to clear rats, stoats and possums by 2050 — and give the goal back the dedicated delivery team that was cut in 2025.

Predator Free 2050 was created in 2016 under a National-led government and carried by every government since — the closest thing New Zealand conservation has to cross-party common ground. Disestablishing the dedicated delivery company in 2025 kept the goal on paper while cutting the capability — the quiet way ambitious goals die. Restoring a ring-fenced delivery arm re-couples the promise to the machinery, and keeps faith with the community trapping groups who volunteer on the government’s word.

• Predator Free 2050 (2016) — The founding announcement — “the most ambitious conservation project attempted anywhere in the world” — made under a National government in 2016 and sustained across party lines since.
• Ministry for Primary Industries — cost of pests — Pests cost New Zealand about NZ$3.3 billion a year in lost production and control costs — the economic floor under the ecological case for finishing the job.

Evidence — Predator Free 2050 Ltd was disestablished at Budget 2025 and its functions folded into the Department of Conservation to save about NZ$12.6 million over four years — the goal retained, the dedicated capability cut.

Bring back the stronger legal limit on farm methane, or lock it to keeping global warming near 1.5 degrees, instead of quietly watering it down.

The Climate Change Commission judged a 35-47% methane cut by 2050 consistent with the global 1.5 degree effort; the government is softening the legislated 24-47% range toward 14-24%, below it. A science-based or explicitly 1.5-degree-bound target keeps New Zealand’s law tethered to the physical carbon budget rather than to political convenience, and methane’s short atmospheric life makes it the strongest near-term lever on temperature.

• IPCC (AR6) — The 1.5 degree limit rests on a rapidly shrinking carbon budget that requires deep, rapid and sustained cuts to methane as well as carbon dioxide — short-lived methane is the fastest brake on near-term warming.
• Climate Change Commission (2024 review of the 2050 target) — The Commission’s own assessment that a 35-47% biogenic-methane reduction is the range aligned with the global 1.5 degree pathway — the science-based benchmark a target should be bound to.
• Drew Shindell — He led the assessment showing that cutting short-lived methane delivers the fastest available brake on near-term warming, with large parallel gains for health and food crops — the case for treating a methane cut as the strongest immediate lever.

Evidence — UNEP/CCAC Global Methane Assessment (2021): cutting human-caused methane by up to 45% this decade avoids nearly 0.3 degrees of warming by the 2040s, keeps 1.5 degrees in reach, and would prevent on the order of 260,000 premature deaths a year worldwide.

Make it a legal requirement for the government to reply to its expert climate advisers on schedule, not years late.

New Zealand deferred its statutory response to Climate Change Commission advice by about two years. A binding duty to respond within a fixed window — as the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Act 2008 imposes for the Committee on Climate Change — closes the loophole that lets a government bank inconvenient advice indefinitely, while leaving the eventual decision with ministers.

• Thomas Schelling — His theory of the commitment device: by binding its own future hand in advance, a government removes the temptation to defer, turning a duty to respond into a credible, self-enforcing constraint rather than advice it can quietly bank.
• United Kingdom Climate Change Act 2008 — The working precedent: a statutory duty on government to respond to its independent Committee on Climate Change, turning expert advice into an obligatory, timed feedback loop rather than optional counsel.

Evidence — New Zealand’s statutory response to Climate Change Commission advice was deferred about two years — the gap a binding response duty would close.

Set out a plan to cut emissions at home, so the country buys far fewer costly carbon credits from overseas.

Treasury models the offshore-credit cost of the 2030 target at NZ$4.4-5.0 billion — a fiscal transfer abroad that leaves no lasting domestic asset and does nothing for the roughly 84-million-tonne shortfall. Redirecting that spending toward home abatement converts a recurring liability into investment in grid, industry and land, where green public spending carries higher economic multipliers.

• Dani Rodrik — His case for green industrial policy: public direction to build domestic clean capacity — grid, industry, land — rather than buying compliance abroad, so each invested dollar also leaves a lasting national asset.
• Stern Review — Climate change is the greatest market failure, and acting early — and at home — is markedly cheaper than deferring and importing the cost later.

Evidence — Treasury modelling puts the offshore-credit cost of meeting the 2030 target at NZ$4.4-5.0 billion — money that leaves the economy with no domestic asset to show for it.

Give businesses clear, stable rules so they confidently invest their own money in the clean-energy shift.

Reversals — a weakened methane target, reopened gas exploration, an Emissions Trading Scheme that does not bind — raise the risk premium and cost of capital for clean investment. A credible, durable carbon price and pathway is the cheapest single lever to crowd in private finance: public direction de-risks the first movers so private money follows.

• Kydland and Prescott — Their account of why discretionary policy is time-inconsistent: when a government can reverse course, rational investors price that risk in. A binding, rules-based pathway is the credible commitment that lowers the cost of capital for clean investment.
• Stern Review — A credible, predictable long-term policy framework and a stable carbon price lower the risk premium, and so lower the overall cost of mitigation.

Evidence — IMF: green spending multipliers run about 1.1-1.5 versus roughly 0.5-0.6 for fossil spending — each public dollar, once policy is credible, mobilises more than a dollar of activity and crowds in private capital.

Put a small, steady charge on farm methane, with the money handed straight back to help farmers cut it, so the country’s single biggest climate pollutant isn’t priced at zero while drivers and factories pay.

Agriculture is about 53% of gross emissions yet faces no carbon price after the He Waka Eke Noa split-gas levy was dropped in 2024. A low, fully-recycled split-gas levy prices the externality at the margin and returns revenue to fund on-farm abatement — feed additives, methane vaccines, low-emissions breeding — pricing the pollutant without confiscating farm incomes, and treating methane separately from long-lived carbon dioxide as its different chemistry warrants.

• Stern Review — Unpriced greenhouse-gas emissions are the textbook externality; the corrective is to price the social cost so the polluter, not the public, carries it.
• James K. Boyce — His case that carbon pricing becomes just and politically durable only when the revenue returns to people as equal dividends — because the gifts of nature belong to all, not to polluters or the treasury.

Evidence — New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory: agriculture is about 53% of gross emissions — the single largest source, currently carrying no carbon price.

Tighten the carbon market: sell fewer new permits so the huge leftover pile shrinks toward zero by 2030, and put back the rule that permit settings must follow the carbon budgets.

A unit surplus lets emitters draw on a stockpile instead of cutting, holding the price weak and the cap effectively non-binding. That drawdown is already working — the surplus has fallen from about 68 million units to a central estimate near 30 million, with auction volumes more than halved for 2025–29 — so the ask is to finish the job by 2030 and to restore the legal requirement, removed in 2025, that unit settings accord with the Paris commitment. A binding cap is the precondition for the price signal to drive real abatement rather than paper compliance.

• John Dales — The economist who originated tradable pollution rights, and whose core insight is that the instrument works only if the cap is genuinely scarce: an over-allocated market with a unit glut is no real limit — the price collapses and the cap stops binding.
• Stern Review — A credible, steadily tightening carbon price is the core instrument for cost-effective mitigation — its strength depends on scarcity, which a unit glut destroys.

Evidence — Climate Change Commission (April 2026 advice): the Emissions Trading Scheme surplus is down to a central estimate of about 30 million units — from roughly 68 million — and should be fully drawn down by 2030, with a unit shortfall possible as early as 2028.

Bring back the 2018 law that stopped companies from searching for new oil and gas off New Zealand’s coast.

Reinstating the ban closes the exploration frontier at the cheapest possible moment — before capital is sunk into new fields — turning a future stranded-asset liability into avoided spending. It realigns the Crown Minerals regime with the International Energy Agency’s central finding that a 1.5 °C net-zero pathway approves no new oil and gas fields beyond those already committed in 2021.

• International Energy Agency — The Net Zero by 2050 roadmap’s headline supply finding: beyond projects already committed as of 2021 there are no new oil and gas fields, and no investment in new fossil-fuel supply, anywhere on a 1.5 °C pathway.
• Welsby, Price, Pye and Ekins — Their Nature accounting of a 1.5 °C carbon budget: 58% of oil, 56% of fossil gas and 89% of coal must remain unextracted by 2050 — the quantitative basis for closing new extraction frontiers rather than opening them.

Evidence — The Production Gap Report 2025 finds governments plan to produce more than double — about 120% more — the fossil fuel in 2030 than is consistent with 1.5 °C, with coal alone about 500% over — confirming the global problem is opening more supply, not too little.

Change the mining law’s official goal from actively promoting oil, gas and coal back to carefully managing them.

A statute’s stated purpose is the interpretive lens for every consent, royalty and allocation decision beneath it: “promote” instructs officials to expand extraction, whereas “manage” restores neutral stewardship of a finite public resource. It is a near-zero-cost legislative change that re-points the entire regime without new appropriations.

• Joseph Sax — His foundational public-trust argument: government holds certain natural resources in trust for present and future citizens, bound to manage them for the public rather than hand them to private exploitation — the logic behind a stewardship purpose over a promote-extraction one.
• Dasgupta Review — The Economics of Biodiversity’s core claim that nature is an asset to be managed prudently within its regenerative limits — treated as capital on the balance sheet, not depleted as if it were free.

Spend the NZ$200 million set aside for new gas fields on power lines, batteries and cutting energy waste instead.

Re-tasking already-committed capital needs no new appropriation, and directed into a grid already about 85–88% renewable it earns the kind of return public money rarely matches in fossil ventures. It is a mission-oriented redeployment that builds cheap, sovereign electricity as a long-run input advantage rather than deepening exposure to a declining commodity.

• Mariana Mazzucato — The mission-economy / entrepreneurial-state argument that public capital should be directed to shape markets toward a public-purpose mission and crowd in private investment, rather than de-risk incumbents or socialise their losses.
• Amory Lovins — His soft-energy-path case that the cheapest gains come from efficiency and distributed renewables — cutting waste and building flexible capacity — not from expanding centralised fossil supply, exactly the redeployment of a gas fund into grid, storage and saved energy.

Evidence — IMF analysis finds green public spending multipliers above one — around 1.1–1.5 for renewables — so each redeployed dollar returns more than a dollar in near-term activity, into a New Zealand grid the MBIE statistics put at roughly 85–88% renewable, varying with hydro years.

Bring back the fund that helps factories switch from burning gas and coal to clean electric heat, so a drilling ban actually cuts pollution instead of just importing the gas.

A supply-side ban without matching demand reduction risks leakage — domestic gas simply replaced by imported liquefied natural gas, shifting emissions rather than cutting them. Pairing the ban with process-heat decarbonisation closes that loop, and as a co-investment instrument the fund crowded in more than two private dollars per public dollar — the market-shaping the entrepreneurial-state model predicts.

• Mariana Mazzucato — The entrepreneurial-state case for public co-investment that crowds in private capital and shares both risk and reward, steering industry toward a decarbonisation mission rather than merely subsidising it.
• Green and Denniss — Their both-arms-of-the-scissors argument that a supply-side restriction works only when paired with demand-side measures — cut extraction alone and the gap fills with imports, so decarbonising process heat is what makes the ban actually reduce emissions.

Evidence — The EECA process-heat decarbonisation co-fund (GIDI) attracted well over NZ$2 of private capital for every public dollar, with multi-million-tonne lifetime CO2 abatement contracted at large industrial sites such as New Zealand Steel and Fonterra.

Set a clear end-date for existing oil and gas production, and a plan to move Taranaki’s workers and towns into new jobs so no one is left behind.

Halting only new exploration leaves existing fields pumping for decades with no finish line; a dated wind-down addresses the production gap — the real budget-breaker — while giving workers, councils and investors a predictable horizon to plan against. International Labour Organization guidance shows that pairing the phase-out with social dialogue and funded regional planning is what makes a transition durable and politically survivable.

• International Labour Organization — The Guidelines for a Just Transition: manage structural change through social dialogue, decent-work creation and social protection so that workers and regions exposed to a high-carbon phase-out are carried into new livelihoods rather than stranded.
• International Energy Agency — The Net Zero by 2050 finding that on a 1.5 °C path the focus for producers shifts to winding down existing operations as demand falls — not just declining to open new fields.
• Newell and Mulvaney — A political-economy account of the just transition beyond the ILO guidelines, showing a low-carbon shift holds together only when the equity claims of fossil-dependent workers and regions are met — the fairness a funded Taranaki transition is meant to deliver.

Evidence — The Production Gap Report 2025 shows governments plan to produce more than double the fossil fuel in 2030 that a 1.5 °C path allows — so the carbon budget is broken by ongoing and planned production, which only a dated wind-down addresses.

Bring back a dedicated environment department that stands on its own, instead of being run from inside the ministry whose job is to push roads, housing and growth.

Housing the environmental regulator inside the agency that drives development creates a built-in conflict of interest: the watchdog answers to the same chief executive and budget line as the developer it is meant to check. A separate department with its own vote, accounting officer and reporting line restores the institutional independence the Environment Act 1986 was designed to provide.

• George Stigler — His economic theory of regulation showed regulators are routinely captured by the very interests they oversee. Housing the environmental watchdog inside the development portfolio builds that capture in by design — which is why independence must be structural, not merely promised.
• Rio Declaration (Principle 15) — The precautionary principle needs an independent voice to carry it — you cannot impartially manage what you structurally subordinate to a competing development goal.
• United Nations (Sustainable Development Goal 16) — Effective, accountable and independent institutions are a development goal in their own right, not a luxury — an environmental regulator must be one of them.

Evidence — 583 of the 588 submissions opposed folding the Ministry for the Environment into the development-led mega-ministry, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment advised against including it.

Write its existence, its funding and its reports into law, so a future government cannot quietly fold it away or bury its findings inside a bigger department.

Statutory entrenchment with a ring-fenced appropriation turns the body from an organisational unit that Cabinet can abolish — as the Ministry for the Environment was from 1 July 2026 — into a creature of Parliament that requires primary legislation to dissolve, the same durability device that already protects the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

• Jonathan Boston — The New Zealand scholar’s diagnosis of the presentist bias that makes governments sacrifice long-term interests, and his case that commitment devices entrenched in law are needed so anticipatory institutions survive the electoral cycle rather than depend on the government of the day.
• Wales (Well-being of Future Generations Act) — The precedent of entrenching a long-view environmental institution and an independent commissioner in primary legislation, so the mandate survives changes of government rather than depending on the goodwill of the current one.

Make sure whatever body carries the environment keeps doing the real jobs: warning ministers, watching the long term, measuring what is happening, and running the environmental laws.

A merger that preserves the name but disperses the functions — advice in one place, monitoring in another, the environmental statutes folded into a development workstream — hollows out the long-horizon expertise, institutional memory and monitoring capacity that take years to rebuild once they are lost.

• Mariana Mazzucato — Her account of the dynamic capabilities of the public sector: the expertise and functions that let a body act with foresight must be retained and nurtured in-house, not fragmented or outsourced, or the state loses the capacity to deliver on its mission.
• Daniel Carpenter — His study of how bureaucratic capability and autonomy are forged slowly — through accumulated expertise, reputation and networks — which makes the long-horizon competence of an environmental authority an asset years in the building and quickly lost once its functions are dispersed.
• Joel Mokyr — His Nobel account of growth: durable progress rests on institutions that generate, protect and apply reliable useful knowledge — the kind of standing scientific and regulatory capability an environmental authority embodies.

Give the independent environmental watchdog who reports to Parliament more power and more funding to scrutinise government decisions.

Strengthening an officer of Parliament — independent of the executive and reporting directly to the House — is the cheapest available check: it adds an oversight layer that survives changes of government and can investigate where a merged or development-led ministry structurally cannot.

• Elinor Ostrom — Her design principles on monitoring (monitors accountable to the community) and nested enterprises (oversight organised as a distinct, higher governance layer) — independent scrutiny is a separate institutional tier, not something the monitored body can supply for itself.
• United Nations (Sustainable Development Goal 16) — Accountable, transparent institutions at every level — an independent commissioner is the mechanism that delivers that accountability for the environment.

Today the government partly decides what gets measured about the environment; a neutral system, measured the same way every time, lets everyone see whether nature is actually improving.

Amending the Environmental Reporting Act 2015 to mandate a nationally-coordinated monitoring system and a strategy to fill data gaps takes the choice of what gets measured out of ministerial discretion — and you cannot manage, or be held to account for, what you do not consistently monitor.

• Kate Raworth — Doughnut economics: staying inside the ecological ceiling requires actually measuring performance against it, so consistent environmental indicators are the precondition for keeping within planetary boundaries.
• Pereira and colleagues — Their proposal of essential biodiversity variables — a harmonised set measured the same way everywhere, so change can be tracked consistently. Standardised indicators are the precondition for monitoring that does not depend on what a minister chooses to count.

Evidence — The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s own recommendations: amend the Environmental Reporting Act 2015, develop a comprehensive nationally-coordinated environmental monitoring system, and adopt a mandated strategy to prioritise and incrementally fill data gaps.

A country’s accounts count cash and concrete but treat forests, rivers and soils as free, so using them up can look like pure profit — writing nature in as an asset means depleting it finally shows up as a real cost.

Requiring Treasury to value the nation’s natural capital and report its change year on year — building on its existing four-capitals Living Standards Framework — makes environmental drawdown visible at the point where fiscal decisions are made, converting nature from an unpriced externality into a tracked asset that can be seen to shrink.

• Robert Costanza and colleagues — Their foundational global valuation of ecosystem services and natural capital, showing nature supplies tens of trillions of dollars in services conventional accounts treat as free. Putting that value on the books makes its depletion finally register as a cost.
• New Zealand Treasury (Living Standards Framework) — Treasury’s own four-capitals approach, which already treats natural capital as one of the four stocks underpinning wellbeing — the existing domestic hook for reporting its year-on-year change.
• UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting — The United Nations adopted Ecosystem Accounting as an international statistical standard in 2021, giving countries an agreed method to record ecosystems and their services in national accounts — the ready-made framework for placing natural capital on the Crown balance sheet.

Evidence — Dasgupta Review headline messages: ’between 1992 and 2014, produced capital per person doubled, and human capital per person increased by about 13% globally; but the stock of natural capital per person declined by nearly 40%’, and ’Introducing natural capital into national accounting systems would be a critical step towards making inclusive wealth our measure of progress.’

Put a dedicated scientific voice for the planet right where government decisions are made — someone whose job is to turn Earth-system science, from rising carbon dioxide and melting ice to ocean acidification and tipping-point risk, into clear advice for the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

This gives Earth-system science standing in the room where trade-offs are decided, alongside the economic and security advice that already shapes policy — not a new ministry but a named advisory office with direct access to the head of government. New Zealand already runs a Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor; a planetary remit specialises that office for the border-crossing, slow-moving risks that no single portfolio owns and that outlast any one electoral cycle.

• Belgium — Chief Planetary Officer — In June 2026 Belgium became the first country to join the Chief Planetary Scientist Network — convened by the Planetary Guardians and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research — with Luc Bas, director of Belgium’s federal Climate Risk Assessment Centre, named the world’s first Chief Planetary Officer, an appointment endorsed by the federal climate minister.
• Planetary Guardians — Chief Planetary Scientist Network — The initiative, launched with Johan Rockström at London Climate Action Week 2026, calls for every government to have a dedicated scientific voice on the planetary boundaries — seven of the nine of which are now transgressed.
• Stockholm Resilience Centre (planetary boundaries) — The scientific framework such an adviser would carry into government — the nine biophysical limits that keep the Earth system in the stable state civilisation depends on.

Evidence — New Zealand already maintains a Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, hosted by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet — the existing office a planetary remit would extend, rather than a new body to build from scratch.

Make New Zealand the first country to turn the planet’s measured safe limits — and its fair share of them — into a national dashboard the Budget can be tested against.

The Earth Commission has quantified Earth-system boundaries that are both safe and just — for climate, water, nutrients, aerosols and the biosphere. Academic downscalings exist for a handful of countries, but no nation has adopted the safe-and-just framework as policy. New Zealand already runs the machinery this needs — a four-capitals framework, world-first climate disclosure, and the independent reporting system this recommendation strengthens — so the step is genuinely operational, not declaratory.

• Rockström and colleagues — safe and just Earth-system boundaries — The 2023 Nature quantification of Earth-system boundaries that are both safe (for stability) and just (minimising harm) — most already crossed globally — the framework a national translation would make operational.
• Earth Commission — The scientific body behind the safe-and-just boundaries, whose translation programme is explicitly designed for actors — cities, companies, countries — to take up their share.

Bring back the public’s right to be told about a project, to have their say on it, and to challenge a decision they believe is wrong.

Notification, submission and appeal rights are the operating core of environmental democracy; stripping them, as the fast-track regime did, does not remove conflict but relocates it into post-consent litigation and reputational risk. Restoring them front-loads scrutiny, improving the quality, legitimacy and durability of decisions before money is committed.

• Aarhus Convention (UNECE) — The three-pillar standard of environmental democracy — access to information, public participation and access to justice — explicitly because participation enhances the quality and the implementation of environmental decisions.
• Rio Declaration, Principle 10 — Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, with access to information and to judicial and administrative proceedings.
• David R. Boyd — His global study of 193 constitutions found that countries which entrench environmental rights end up with stronger laws, greater accountability and better access to justice, information and public participation — the very rights this restores.

Evidence — UNEP’s first Environmental Rule of Law global report (2019): despite a 38-fold increase in environmental laws since 1972, weak implementation and enforcement is the global trend — law on paper achieves little without the public’s standing to engage and challenge.

Require by law that Maori tribes are properly consulted on decisions that affect them, instead of leaving it to whoever is in charge to decide whether to even ask.

A statutory consultation duty converts Te Tiriti partnership from a discretionary courtesy into an enforceable procedural right, moving New Zealand toward the international standard of free, prior and informed consent and reducing the judicial-review risk that consultation failures routinely trigger.

• UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — Articles 19 and 32: states must consult and cooperate in good faith through Indigenous peoples’ own representative institutions to obtain free, prior and informed consent before measures or projects affecting their lands and resources.
• IPBES Global Assessment — The flagship assessment finds that bending the biodiversity curve requires inclusive governance recognising the knowledge, institutions and rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities — grounding a legislated duty to consult, not a discretionary one.
• Fikret Berkes — His canonical synthesis showing that Indigenous and local ecological knowledge is a rigorous, adaptive management system in its own right — the case for embedding such knowledge in governance rather than treating consultation as a courtesy.

Evidence — The Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) settlement shows New Zealand can already write binding, statutory recognition of Maori relationships into law — proof that a legislated consultation duty is workable, not aspirational.

Set firm environmental limits, written into law, that a minister cannot waive or overrule just to push a project through.

Non-waivable bottom-lines convert open-ended ministerial discretion into a bounded decision space — the legal analogue of a planetary boundary or the doughnut’s ecological ceiling. They give investors one stable, predictable rule instead of case-by-case political bargaining, and prevent the cumulative erosion that incremental exemptions cause.

• Stockholm Resilience Centre (planetary boundaries) — The safe operating space framing: a set of biophysical limits humanity should not transgress if it wants to keep Earth in a stable state — limits, not negotiable preferences.
• Kate Raworth (doughnut economics) — The ecological ceiling: a hard outer boundary that all economic activity must stay within, beyond which lies dangerous environmental degradation.
• Rockström, Steffen and colleagues — The founding paper that first defined and quantified the planetary boundaries — biophysical thresholds humanity should not cross to keep Earth in a stable state — the primary science behind the limits this would make legally non-waivable.

Evidence — Rockstrom et al. (2023), Safe and just Earth system boundaries (Nature): most of the quantified safe and just Earth-system boundaries are already transgressed — the empirical case for codifying limits that discretion cannot relax further.

Bring back the right to ask an independent specialist court to re-examine whether a decision was actually good for the environment, not just argue a narrow legal technicality.

Merits (de novo) review by the specialist Environment Court — which re-hears the evidence and substitutes its own decision rather than only checking the legal process — is the third Aarhus pillar, access to justice. The fast-track regime leaves only a narrow, costly point-of-law appeal; restoring merits review with affordable standing keeps powerful consenting decisions genuinely contestable by ordinary communities and iwi.

• Aarhus Convention (UNECE) — Pillar 3 — access to justice: the public’s right to judicial or administrative recourse to challenge environmental decisions, not merely to be informed of them.
• Escazu Agreement (ECLAC) — The regional treaty making access to justice in environmental matters a binding right — the first in the world to also protect environmental defenders who use it.
• Brian Preston — Written by a leading environment-court chief judge, this study sets out what makes a specialist environmental court work — including accessible, low-cost, comprehensive merits jurisdiction — exactly the institution and review this restores access to.

Evidence — New Zealand’s Environment Court already hears Resource Management Act appeals de novo — re-examining the evidence and making its own decision in place of the council’s — so the merits-review institution exists and works; the fast-track law simply removes access to it.

Big decisions should rest on published evidence of what a project will do to nature and the climate, out in the open before any approval, not a private briefing the public never sees.

A mandatory, published and binding impact assessment operationalises Rio Principle 17 (assess significant impacts) and Principle 15 (act precautiously under uncertainty): it puts the burden on the proponent to show low harm and makes the evidence reviewable. Crucially, binding closes the common loophole where an assessment is produced but the decision-maker is free to set it aside.

• Rio Declaration, Principles 17 and 15 — Principle 17 makes environmental impact assessment a national instrument for any activity likely to have significant adverse impact; Principle 15 adds the precautionary approach — lack of full scientific certainty is no reason to postpone preventing serious or irreversible harm.
• International Court of Justice — The World Court held that undertaking an environmental impact assessment, where a project risks significant transboundary harm, has become a requirement under general international law — establishing assessment as a binding legal duty, not an optional formality.
• Dasgupta Review — Because the economy is embedded in finite nature, the value at stake in a decision must be assessed and accounted for before it is committed, not discovered afterward.

Say where New Zealand stands on making the worst destruction of nature an international crime — and write a matching offence into our own law.

The ecocide proposal is now a live Pacific initiative: Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa formally submitted a Rome Statute amendment to the International Criminal Court’s assembly in September 2024. Belgium legislated ecocide in its 2024 penal code, the European Union’s 2024 Environmental Crime Directive punishes conduct comparable to ecocide, and Mauritius brought an ecocide offence into force in April 2026. For a charter grounded in Earth-system justice, supporting the neighbourhood’s initiative and mirroring it domestically is the consistent position.

• Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa — proposal to the International Criminal Court — The formal September 2024 submission to amend the Rome Statute to recognise ecocide — the first such proposal by states, led from New Zealand’s own region.
• European Union — Environmental Crime Directive 2024/1203 — The directive’s qualified offences cover conduct “comparable to ecocide” — destruction or widespread, substantial, irreversible or long-lasting damage to ecosystems — carrying up to eight years’ imprisonment.

Evidence — Mauritius criminalised ecocide with effect from 18 April 2026 — up to ten years’ imprisonment plus restoration orders — joining Belgium (2024) in legislating the offence nationally.

Put the right to a healthy environment somewhere a bare majority cannot reach — entrenched, for people now and people to come.

Every statutory device in this charter can be repealed by a simple parliamentary majority — as the 2018 exploration ban, the methane target and the Ministry for the Environment were. Entrenchment is the one durability instrument that answers this structurally, and New Zealand has a worked draft: Palmer and Butler’s proposed constitution includes a right to an environment not harmful to health, held for the benefit of future generations and enforceable in court. Internationally the ground has moved the same way: the Inter-American Court recognised the right to a healthy climate in 2025.

• Palmer and Butler — A Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand — The 2016 draft constitution by a former Prime Minister and a leading constitutional lawyer, whose bill of rights includes an enforceable right to an environment not harmful to health, protecting the interests of future generations.
• David Boyd — His global survey finding that constitutional environmental rights measurably strengthen environmental law and outcomes where adopted — as most of the world’s constitutions now have.

Evidence — Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 (July 2025): recognised an autonomous right to a healthy climate — and became the first international court to recognise Nature as a holder of rights.

Put the health of the water back first: restore the rule that consent decisions must respect Te Mana o te Wai, and take its deletion off the table.

Te Mana o te Wai is a hierarchy of obligations — first the health of the water, then essential human needs, then other uses — at the heart of the national freshwater framework. A 2024 amendment barred consent authorities from having regard to it when deciding applications, and the current freshwater consultation includes options to remove it from the framework altogether, with final decisions not yet made. Restoring it in consenting, and ruling out removal, is the non-regression principle applied to the most publicly felt environmental issue in the country.

• Michel Prieur — The jurist who defined non-regression — environmental law may be modernised but never weakened below the protection already achieved — applied here to the freshwater hierarchy stripped from consenting in 2024.
• Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 — New Zealand’s own strongest statement of water’s standing — the Whanganui River as a legal person — the jurisprudential ground on which putting the river’s health first already rests.

Evidence — The Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2024 prevents consent authorities from having regard to the Te Mana o te Wai hierarchy in resource consenting; the 2025–26 freshwater consultation includes options to remove or rebalance it further, with final decisions not yet made.

A permanent group of everyday New Zealanders, chosen at random like a jury and rotating over time, meets to work through the hard choices on climate and nature and advise the country.

Selection by lot (sortition) assembles a near-representative cross-section of the public that is structurally insulated from electoral cycles and organised lobbying, so it can hold the long-term, common-pool interest that politicians facing a three-year term are pressured to discount. Making it standing rather than one-off builds institutional memory and a mandate that outlasts any single government.

• OECD — The OECD ’deliberative wave’ finding that random selection (civic lottery) produces a broadly representative microcosm of the population, and that standing citizens’ panels are a recognised institutional model for embedding deliberation in government.
• Hélène Landemore — Her case for placing a randomly selected, jury-like mini-public at the heart of democratic power, so representation rests on sortition and deliberation rather than election — a near-microcosm of the people, not the loudest voices.
• Earth4All / Club of Rome — Earth4All’s case for deepening democracy — including citizens’ assemblies and long-term-thinking institutions — as part of the systemic governance shift in its Giant Leap scenario toward wellbeing within planetary boundaries.
• United Nations (SDG 16.7) — The target of responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.

When the assembly makes a recommendation, the government must either act on it or publicly explain why it will not, instead of quietly ignoring it.

An ’adopt-or-explain’ (comply-or-explain) duty converts non-binding advice into a transparency obligation: it preserves parliamentary sovereignty while raising the political cost of silent rejection, forcing reasons onto the public record. France is the failure mode — Macron’s ’sans filtre’ pledge over 149 proposals carried no legal force, so the proposals were filtered and weakened in Parliament rather than enacted.

• France’s Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat — The cautionary tale: a non-binding ’unfiltered’ promise let the government and Parliament filter and dilute the citizens’ proposals, because nothing in law obliged a reasoned response.
• OECD — Among the institutionalisation models, requiring a public, reasoned government response to deliberative recommendations is what gives a citizens’ body real traction without overriding elected representatives.
• John Dryzek — His deliberative-systems account: a citizens’ body only matters if its conclusions are transmitted into the empowered decision-making space, and that space is held accountable for taking them up — the logic behind an adopt-or-explain duty.

Evidence — East Belgium’s permanent Citizens’ Dialogue obliges Parliament to take up each recommendation and report back in writing on its implementation — the working precedent for a reason-giving response duty, in contrast to France’s unbound convention whose proposals were filtered and watered down.

Build it together with Māori as Treaty partners from the very start, so it is shared rather than handed down.

Under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, an assembly speaking for the commons must be co-designed with tangata whenua or it risks reproducing majoritarian override of Māori rights and interests. Co-design also embeds mātauranga Māori and a relational, intergenerational ethic of guardianship (kaitiakitanga) that aligns with the institution’s long-term purpose.

• He Ara Waiora (New Zealand Treasury) — Treasury’s tikanga-based Māori wellbeing framework — a Crown-recognised model for embedding te ao Māori, partnership and intergenerational wellbeing in public decision-making.
• Matike Mai Aotearoa — Aotearoa’s own constitutional-transformation model, built from 252 hui, sets out tino-rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga spheres meeting in a shared relational sphere — a Tiriti-based design for co-decision that structurally checks bare majoritarian override of Māori.
• OECD — Representativeness and genuine inclusion are core design requirements of any credible deliberative body, not optional add-ons.

Give the assembly its own law, its own staff and its own protected, multi-year budget, so it cannot be switched off the moment it says something inconvenient.

Permanence is the difference between influence and theatre. A statutory basis, an independent standing secretariat and ring-fenced multi-year funding insulate the body from defunding, stalling or quiet retirement when its conclusions are politically uncomfortable — the institutional design the OECD identifies as decisive, and exactly what France’s one-off convention lacked.

• OECD — The institutionalisation finding: embedding deliberation requires a permanent legal mandate, an independent secretariat and secure funding; East Belgium’s 2019 model is the flagship of a standing, statutory citizens’ body linked to a law-making parliament.
• Graham Smith — His comparative study of how to design durable participatory institutions — judged on whether their form actually delivers inclusion and considered judgment — the institutional-design grounding for why permanence, independence and secure funding decide success.
• France’s Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat — The contrast case: with no permanent statutory home, the convention was convened once and could be left to lapse, its momentum dissipating after a single sitting.

Evidence — East Belgium’s Permanent Citizens’ Dialogue, anchored by official decree since 2019 with a dedicated secretariat and membership that rotates by one-third each cycle, is still operating ’five years on’ and secured beyond elections — proof that statutory permanence works.

Pass a law that gives people not yet born a permanent voice, with an independent guardian whose job is to protect their long-term interests.

A Future Generations Act installs a statutory ’sustainable development duty’ across public bodies plus an independent commissioner to enforce the long view — a structural counterweight to the short-termism of three-year electoral cycles. It complements the assembly: the assembly deliberates, the commissioner audits whether decisions honour future generations.

• Wales (Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015) — Seven long-term wellbeing goals, a binding ’sustainable development principle’ on public bodies, and an independent Future Generations Commissioner who monitors whether decisions serve future generations.
• Finland (Committee for the Future) — A permanent parliamentary committee dedicated to long-range policy and foresight — institutionalising the long view inside the legislature itself.
• United Nations (Declaration on Future Generations, 2024) — Adopted by consensus at the 2024 Summit of the Future — New Zealand among the states backing it — it commits governments to weigh the needs and interests of those not yet born in today’s decisions; a Future Generations Act is how a country turns that pledge into a binding domestic duty.
• Roman Krznaric — His case for cathedral thinking and being good ancestors — a cultural argument for institutions that lengthen society’s time horizon beyond the electoral cycle and speak for those not yet born.

Evidence — Wales’ Act binds public bodies to seven wellbeing goals measured against 50 national indicators, with an independent Commissioner monitoring progress — a working template for putting the interests of future generations on a legal footing.

Make influence visible: a public register of who is lobbying whom, cooling-off periods for the revolving door, and donation disclosure put back where it was.

New Zealand has no lobbying regulation at all — no register, no cooling-off periods — placing it near the bottom of the OECD on regulating influence, and the reform programme announced in 2023 has publicly stalled. Meanwhile the Electoral Amendment Act 2025 raised the donor-identity disclosure threshold to $6,000 from 2026, passed over the votes of every non-government party. A charter that names regulatory capture as a driver of the rollback owes it an instrument, and transparency is the cheapest one there is.

• George Stigler — The founding economics of regulatory capture: concentrated interests predictably acquire regulation and bend it to their benefit unless institutions are designed to resist — the diagnosis this action finally gives an instrument.
• Reporting on New Zealand’s lobbying vacuum — New Zealand is one of the few OECD democracies with no lobbying register or rules, and the reform work programme announced in 2023 has stalled, with regulation publicly ruled “not a priority”.

Evidence — The Electoral Amendment Act 2025 — passed 68 votes to 54 over the opposition of every non-government party — raised the donor-identity disclosure threshold from $5,000 to $6,000 from 1 January 2026.

Decide who pays when the water comes — before it comes. The adaptation cost-sharing question was left for after the election; give it to the assembly.

The National Adaptation Framework of October 2025 built pillars and flood maps but expressly deferred the cost-sharing decision — who pays when homes and streets must move — to the next parliamentary term. It is the paradigm case for deliberative democracy: intergenerational, distributional, certain to anger someone, and unanswerable by any single party without accusations of bias. A citizens’ assembly with an adopt-or-explain duty is machinery built for exactly this shape of question.

• Hélène Landemore — Her case that randomly selected citizens’ bodies outperform electoral politics precisely on long-horizon, distributional questions where parties are structurally afraid to move first.
• OECD — deliberative democracy — The OECD’s evidence review: representative deliberative processes are most valuable for values-laden, long-term trade-offs — and their recommendations endure best when institutionalised.

Evidence — The National Adaptation Framework (October 2025) deferred the managed-retreat cost-sharing decision — who pays — to the next electoral term, even as the Insurance Council publicly urges urgency.

Pick a few clear, measurable national goals for the shift to a cleaner economy, so money and effort all point the same way and progress can actually be tracked.

A mission framework reframes the state from market-fixer to market-shaper: a small number of ambitious, time-bound public goals set a direction that private capital co-invests behind, while measurable targets make the spending accountable rather than open-ended. New Zealand already has the scaffolding to anchor such missions in its own Treasury frameworks, so this is a way of organising effort, not a new bureaucracy.

• Mariana Mazzucato — Mazzucato’s mission-oriented strategy and entrepreneurial state — the public sector sets clear, ambitious societal missions that give direction to and crowd in private investment, rather than merely de-risking markets after the fact.
• Joel Mokyr (2025 Nobel, shared with Aghion and Howitt) — Mokyr’s account that sustained growth comes from useful knowledge, innovation and institutions conducive to technological progress — not from extracting a finite resource — which is the case for steering investment toward a more complex, knowledge-based economy.
• Carlota Perez — Her account of how lasting prosperity arrives when public direction steers financial capital out of speculation and into deploying a new techno-economic paradigm — the golden age that follows a bubble only when the state actively shapes where investment flows.

Evidence — Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity ranks New Zealand around 50th for economic complexity while it remains one of the world’s higher-income economies — rich but dangerously undiversified, the commodity trap a mission framework is designed to climb out of.

Pay for the first moves by re-pointing money the government has already set aside — the NZ$200m earmarked for new gas — plus the green bonds it already sells, and treat the billions the country would otherwise owe for overseas carbon credits as a debt that cutting emissions at home shrinks.

This answers the fiscal objection honestly. The NZ$200m gas co-investment is committed money that can be re-pointed; sovereign green bonds already exist — nearly NZ$10bn on issue, ordinary core Crown debt, honestly counted; and the NZ$4.4–5.0bn offshore-credit line is a priced-but-unfunded liability, not a pot to spend — every tonne of domestic abatement shrinks a bill the Government has refused to fund but cannot repeal. With net core Crown debt forecast to peak near 46% of GDP against the 50% ceiling Treasury calls prudent, the case is disciplined: capital with returns, not subsidy for a declining asset. Mission framing then crowds in private capital alongside the public funds rather than substituting for them.

• John Maynard Keynes — Keynesian public investment — counter-cyclical timing, mobilising idle capacity, and spending multipliers — the case that well-timed public outlay can pay for much of itself in near-term activity.
• Mariana Mazzucato — Mazzucato’s argument that patient public finance with a clear mission crowds in — rather than crowds out — private capital, multiplying each public dollar.
• Hepburn, Stern, Stiglitz and colleagues — Their survey of 231 finance officials and economists found clean infrastructure, building retrofits and natural-capital restoration rank highest on both short-run economic multiplier and climate impact — direct evidence that front-loaded green spending pays back fastest.

Evidence — IMF working paper (Batini et al. 2021) estimates renewable-energy spending multipliers of about 1.1–1.5 against 0.5–0.6 for fossil spending — output multipliers: each dollar generates more than a dollar of economic activity, which is distinct from cash returned to the Crown.

Start with the jobs that hire fast and pay back quickly — insulating homes, upgrading the grid and public transport, and repairing nature — so the benefits land inside one political term, not just decades out.

Sequencing is a fiscal choice: labour-intensive, shovel-ready work delivers jobs and measurable returns inside a single three-year cycle, defusing the ’pays off too late’ objection. Ecosystem restoration done as infrastructure also counts toward the Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30% restoration target, so one spend serves climate, jobs and nature at once.

• John Maynard Keynes — Keynes on front-loading labour-intensive public works to mobilise idle capacity quickly, where high-employment spending carries the largest short-run multipliers.
• Jason Hickel — Hickel’s provisioning-systems view — human wellbeing rests on the quality of energy, housing, transport and food systems within planetary boundaries — which is precisely the retrofit/grid/transit/restoration agenda to build first.
• Tim Jackson — His post-growth macroeconomics, in which prosperity means health, security and flourishing within ecological limits rather than rising GDP — a defined, workable framework for measuring success by what the economy actually provides.

Evidence — EECA’s 2020 Motu evaluation put the Warmer Kiwi Homes benefit-cost ratio at 4.66 to 1 — excluding comfort and wellbeing gains — building on the 3.9 to 1 found for its predecessor Warm Up New Zealand; complemented by restoration creating over 15,500 employment starts at speed and riparian repair showing benefit-cost ratios up to 22:1.

Promise a dedicated fund and real new jobs for the workers and towns hit hardest by the change — like Taranaki’s oil-and-gas region — so nobody is left behind.

Distributional design is what lets climate policy survive: where transitions placed costs on households unfairly they were reversed at the ballot box — France’s gilets jaunes fuel-tax revolt, and Switzerland’s 2021 CO2-law defeat — while fairer designs endured. A funded just transition concentrates costs on the largest emitters and beneficiaries and carries affected regions into new work, turning a political liability into durable consent.

• International Labour Organization — The ILO Guidelines for a just transition — social dialogue, income and reskilling support, and regional economic diversification so the shift to a low-carbon economy is decent-work-creating rather than displacing.
• Earth4All / Club of Rome — Earth4All’s inequality (and poverty) turnaround — narrowing inequality and protecting the vulnerable through economic shocks is treated as a precondition for a transition that is socially and politically stable, not an optional add-on.

Charge companies for polluting and for using shared things like air and water, then pay the money back equally to every New Zealander as a yearly dividend, kept in its own fund that the government of the day cannot raid.

A fee-and-dividend recycles commons rents straight back to citizens, which makes a rising carbon or resource price politically durable: lower-income households, who pollute least, come out net ahead, so the fee can keep climbing with public support behind it. An arm’s-length citizens’ fund is what insulates the dividend from Budget raids — exactly the failure mode when New Zealand folded ring-fenced ETS revenue back into the general account in 2024.

• Earth4All / Club of Rome — Earth4All’s Citizens’ Fund and Universal Basic Dividend — companies pay a fee on the economic rents they earn from using common resources, and those fees are paid back to everyone as an equal dividend, without new taxes.
• Peter Barnes — His cap-and-dividend proposal: charge firms for using shared wealth like the air, then pay every person an equal dividend as legitimate property income — co-owned commons turned into a recurring citizens’ payment.

Evidence — New Zealand’s ETS auctions have raised about NZ$5.6 billion since 2021 (ICAP), revenue that ceased to be ring-fenced when the Climate Emergency Response Fund was closed in 2024; Alaska’s Permanent Fund shows an equal commons dividend is durable and popular in practice.

Stop closing New Zealand’s public green bank and instead give it more money, so it can invest alongside private firms and take the first loss on risky clean projects — which is what makes private money show up.

A public green bank that takes first-loss or junior positions de-risks first-of-a-kind clean-energy, low-emissions-farming and restoration projects, mobilising several private dollars per public dollar — the entrepreneurial-state logic of patient, mission-led finance. New Zealand built exactly this institution and deployed close to NZ$400m through it before deciding in April 2025 to wind it down, discarding a working tool rather than fixing it.

• Mariana Mazzucato — Mazzucato’s entrepreneurial state — patient, mission-led public finance that absorbs early-stage risk on first-of-a-kind technologies, crowding private capital in behind a clear public direction.
• Joel Mokyr (2025 Nobel, shared with Aghion and Howitt) — Mokyr’s case that durable prosperity depends on institutions that back useful knowledge and innovation — the kind of patient finance a mission-led public bank supplies — rather than on extracting a finite resource.

Evidence — The Government announced on 8 April 2025 it would wind down New Zealand Green Investment Finance, which had deployed almost NZ$400 million — discontinuing a public green bank designed to crowd private capital into clean projects.

New Zealand barely taxes the profit people make from owning assets like rental property, so tax some of those gains — almost every rich country already does — to help pay for the transition and make the system fairer.

New Zealand has the most limited capital-gains-tax regime in the OECD — 31 of 38 members tax such gains, and only a handful, New Zealand among them, lack a comprehensive one — and that gap channels investment into untaxed assets like housing and widens the wealth inequality that erodes support for climate action. A broad-based CGT raises revenue for the transition and improves fairness, as distinct from a transaction tax that suppresses activity.

• Anthony Atkinson — His fifteen proposals to reduce inequality put capital taxation and a broader tax base at the centre, arguing that taxing accumulated wealth and gains — not only wages — is both feasible and necessary for fairness.
• Thomas Piketty — His data across twenty countries show wealth concentrates whenever returns on capital outpace growth, and inequality does not self-correct — the empirical case for taxing capital and capital gains to hold it in check.

Evidence — OECD Taxation Working Paper No. 72 (2025) on taxing capital gains, which finds New Zealand has the most limited regime for taxing capital gains in the OECD — 31 of 38 members tax such gains, including Australia, Canada and the UK.

Count what we currently pretend is free: publish, every year, what the Crown spends and forgoes in ways that damage nature — and make banks test themselves against nature loss, not just weather.

IPBES puts global public subsidies to nature-degrading sectors at US$1.4–3.3 trillion a year, and no New Zealand Budget document adds up this country’s share. An annual harmful-subsidy and externality account is the cheapest reform in this charter — an accounting exercise on existing data — and the honest funding map the transition needs. Extending disclosure is the natural next step for the first country to legislate mandatory climate-related financial reporting: the Reserve Bank has stress-tested the banks against a severe climate scenario, but not yet against nature loss.

• IPBES Transformative Change Assessment — Its finding that explicit public subsidies to sectors driving nature’s decline reached US$1.4–3.3 trillion a year in 2022, and rising — the global ledger a national account would localise.
• Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures — The ready-made framework for reporting nature-related dependencies and risks — the standard a New Zealand extension of its climate-disclosure regime would adopt.

Evidence — The Reserve Bank’s 2023 climate stress test ran the five largest banks through a 28-year “Too Little Too Late” scenario — solvency held, profits fell by about a quarter — but no equivalent test yet exists for nature-related risk.