Scientists urge MPs to halt five Bills over environmental and health risks

The Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand (PSGR NZ) is calling on Members of Parliament not to approve five Bills currently progressing through Parliament until critical gaps in environmental monitoring, risk assessment and precaution are addressed.

In an Open Letter sent to MPs, PSGR NZ warns that the legislation fails to establish an integrated system for monitoring anthropogenic contaminants and novel organisms, despite a 2023 National Party election commitment to implement eight recommendations made by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in 2022.

The five Bills span environmental management, gene technology, hazardous substances, agricultural compounds and environmental reporting.

“New Zealand cannot effectively regulate what it does not identify, monitor and understand,” PSGR NZ lead researcher Jodie Bruning says.

“Public officials at MPI, the EPA and WorkSafe need legislation that enables them to protect human and environmental health. That means being able to detect emerging harms, learn from evidence overseas and act precautionarily when potentially serious harm is scientifically plausible but uncertain.”

PSGR NZ says the problem is particularly concerning because several of the Bills seek to accelerate or streamline regulatory decision-making while failing to establish corresponding obligations to monitor what happens after substances or novel organisms are released.

The Open Letter points to a recent example involving 104 undisclosed experimental pesticide substances approved by the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (NZ EPA) for trials under applications APP205201 and APP205221. Public documents state that APP205201 includes novel compounds that have not been assessed by any overseas regulatory authority. PSGR NZ is now seeking information from the NZ EPA, the Ministry for Primary Industries and WorkSafe about how these substances were assessed and how worker exposure and unexpected environmental or health effects will be detected.

The organisation also raises concerns about proposed changes to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms framework, the absence of an express precautionary framework across the reforms, and provisions enabling greater reliance on overseas regulatory decisions without requiring New Zealand regulators to identify and use the most recent relevant assessments or best regulatory practice. PSGR NZ trustee Dr Elvira Dommisse, a former scientist on New Zealand’s GE onion research programme, says:

“If regulators don’t know what could be released, where it could go and possibly persist in the environment, what it could break down into and what effects could emerge over time, they are powerless to protect human or environmental health. The same principle applies to potentially heritable new organisms created using gene-editing technologies: we need to understand where they could spread and what could happen over time before decisions are made about their release.”

PSGR NZ says environmental monitoring should form part of the country’s core regulatory infrastructure, rather than remain fragmented across individual agencies and pieces of legislation.

“These Bills could have represented an opportunity for strategic, integrative reform. They are being progressed together, yet none establishes the integrated monitoring and assessment system needed to understand what is accumulating in our water, soils and ecosystems, or what that exposure may mean for human health,” Bruning says.

“We are asking Parliament to send these Bills back to the drawing board. Chemical and new organism approvals need to reflect international best practice, precaution should be embedded at the highest levels of decision-making, and New Zealand needs an integrated monitoring and assessment programme capable of protecting our waters, soils, flora, fauna and human health for generations to come.”

Image credit: Phil Botha