Sustainable Development: How do we Measure it? Part 2 - Focussing on the Cultural Pillar

Annual Conference

The cultural pillar is not necessarily forefront with the perception of sustainable development in New Zealand, with the environmental, economical and social pillars often more prominent. However, we have the cultural aspect of our country’s identity deeply entrenched in our history and legislation, for example with documents such as the Treaty of Waitangi and the Resource Management Act (RMA).

With Part 1 last year we took a look at sustainable development initiatives currently implemented in New Zealand, how these compare to progress made in the United Kingdom and how applicable various sustainable development tools were to the New Zealand water industry.

The matter of how to approach the cultural pillar was highlighted as an issue which increases the complexity of applying existing sustainable development tools within the New Zealand industry. In order to progress with the implementation of sustainable development metrics we need to specifically focus on the cultural pillar, which is completely unique to each culture. This makes it difficult to quantify and challenging to apply as a universal standard.

New Zealand is definitely not the only country to have strong cultural beliefs associated with water abstraction and discharge. This paper investigates a variety of cultures and their approaches and legislations towards sustainable and culturally sensitive use of water supplies and waste water outfalls.

In addition to this, the paper examines a tool New Zealand does have available at this point in time to provide a cultural metric, the Mauri Model, and assesses how it has been applied to date.

Overall, how does our current progress compare to other cultures’ procedures and legislations? And how are we, as New Zealanders who have significant cultural beliefs associated with water abstraction and discharge,

Community Engagement Conference Papers Natural Environment Resource - Conference Papers

13.30 Julia Lovrich - Sustainable Development, How Do We Measure It.pdf

pdf
520 KB
19 Dec 2016