The 10-year Budget and Auckland Plan 2050: Environment

The 10-year Budget and Auckland Plan 2050: Environment

The future of Auckland is in your hands

Our harbours and streams are being polluted by overflows from ageing sewerage and stormwater systems that can’t cope with heavy rainfall, while Kauri dieback disease is threatening one of our most iconic tree species.

Join the conversation on the future of the city as Auckland Council continues to consult on its 10-year Budget and 30-year Auckland Plan. 

The 10-year Budget proposes targeted rates to improve water quality and the environment, including tackling Kauri dieback disease, while the Auckland Plan proposes the long-term protection and enhancement of Auckland's environment by doing things differently as Auckland grows and develops.

Whose responsibility is it to protect our environment? Should declining water quality be accepted as a trade-off from growth and economic prosperity, and what priority should we put on environmental protection?

Bernard Hickey, Managing Editor of Newsroom Pro and Director of Newsroom NZ Ltd,  will be joined by Auckland Mayor Phil Goff and a panel of industry experts to discuss and debate Auckland’s environmental challenges and the potential solutions available.

Tell Auckland Council what you think at akhaveyoursay.nz.

Doors open at 5.00pm Thursday 22 March

Please note this Auckland Conversations is now taking place at Lower NZI, Aotea Centre, Auckland city centre

Listen to the podcast

Rod Oram

International Business Journalist, Newsroom

Rod Oram has more than 40 years’ experience as an international business journalist. He has worked for various publications in Europe and North America, including the Financial Times of London.
Rod and his family emigrated from the UK to New Zealand in 1997. He contributes weekly to Nine to Noon, Newsroom.co.nz and Newstalk ZB. He is a frequent public speaker on deep sustainability, business, economics, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, in both NZ and global contexts.
For more than a decade, Rod has been helping fast-growing New Zealand companies through his involvement with The ICEHOUSE the entrepreneurship centre at the University of Auckland’s Business School. In 2007 Penguin published his book on the New Zealand economy, Reinventing Paradise. He was named the Landcorp Agricultural Communicator of the Year for 2009. In 2010, Rod was the winner in the individual category in the Vero Excellence in Business Support Awards. Rod was a founding trustee and the second chairman of Akina Foundation, which helps social enterprises develop their business models in areas of sustainability. He remains actively involved with the foundation and the ventures it supports. Rod is an adjunct professor at AUT, and Bridget Williams Books has published his latest book, Three Cities: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene.
Rod is in the inaugural cohort of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, This bold programme brings together innovators and investors from here and abroad to help foster global change from Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Margaret Stanley

Associate Professor, University of Auckland

Margaret is an Associate Professor in Ecology at the University of Auckland – Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau. She has been a researcher at the University of Auckland for 10 years, prior to that she was a scientist at Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research.Margaret has broad ecological interests and her research group has covered a menagerie of organisms, from invasive ants, weeds and feral pigs, to lizards, urban trees and birds. Her applied research aims to understand and mitigate the impacts of people on biodiversity. The particular impacts Margaret focuses on are invasive species and urban development. She works with a variety of community partners and stakeholders to inform decision-making through her research.

Nicola Toki

Threatened Species Ambassador, Department of Conservation

Nicola Toki is the Department of Conservation’s Threatened Species Ambassador, a unique role that bridges both science and communication and is focused on advocating biodiversity issues, challenges and actions that we need to take to protect New Zealand’s 4000-plus threatened species and the ecosystems they rely on.Nicola has a first class honours degree in Zoology, as well as a Post-Graduate Diploma in Natural History Filmmaking and Communication and she has also studied law at Otago University. Over the past fifteen years Nicola has made it her business to raise awareness of New Zealand’s native wildlife through her work and her writing, which includes two non-fiction books for young people on NZ ecology.  Nicola has a real love for science communication, and in particular for finding ways to tell stories about complex ecological challenges in an accessible and engaging way.  She appears weekly on Radio New Zealand Afternoons discuss New Zealand’s less charismatic and perhaps slightly unloved species in a segment called Critter of the Week. Prior to this role, Nicola managed the Fonterra “Living Water” partnership with the Department of Conservation for the South Island, worked for OSPRI as a pest control advocate, helped to establish the Predator Free New Zealand Trust as their first project manager, and was a conservation advocate for Forest & Bird.  She has also worked in ecotourism and television production.

Hayden Smith

Founder, Sea Cleaners

Captain Hayden Smith is founder of the commercial marine litter collection concept in Auckland City 2002, and visionary for the Sea Cleaners plan of work. In 2017 he won New Zealander Local Hero of the Year award. He has over 15 years’ experience on the water as a contractor to the Watercare Harbour Clean-Up Trust. Hayden has extensive marine litter collection knowledge from co-ordinating the removal over 5.1 million litres of rubbish from the Waitemata Harbour and surrounding waters. He has directed the co-ordination of over 108,000 volunteer hours of individual support for the concept. He has also co-ordinated a personal expedition to the North Pacific Ocean to raise awareness of litter in the North Pacific Gyre, and has promoted the positive effects of working locally within local communities to solve global issues. Hayden is a founding Trustee of this project to ensure the fulfilment of the plan and its objectives.

Expand speaker bios

Be the first to know about upcoming Auckland Conversations

Sign up to the mailing list