This morning, Simon Upton, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, released his second report on tourism in New Zealand. This is a follow up to his first report “Pristine, popular … imperilled” – a report on NZ tourism by Simon Upton published in December 2019.

He makes four key recommendations in his report.

In today’s report he presents a set of four policy proposals to combat some of the more pressing environmental challenges faced by tourism.

They are all relevant and interesting, but the first two are particularly pertinent – at first glance – to some of the burning issues in the Upper Clutha. They are summarised (simply) as follows …

• Introduce a departure tax that reflects the environmental cost of flying internationally from New Zealand, and use the revenue to support the development of low-emissions aviation technologies and provide a source of climate finance for Pacific Island nations.

• Make any future central government funding for tourism infrastructure conditional on environmental criteria and aligned with mana whenua and the local community’s vision for tourism development.

The WSG team is going to take time to review this 142 page document closely and carefully. For now, we are sharing with you (below) the report, the media release from Simon Upton and his FAQs.

Watch this space.

You can read the full report here.

You can read the media release from Simon Upton here.

You can read Simon Upton’s FAQs ‘Not 100% but four steps closer to sustainable tourism’ here.