New Zealand’s environmental information should be treated as critical national infrastructure, says Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton, whose report Unlocking New Zealand’s Environmental Information has just been tabled.

“We’ve got a very complex, fragmented information landscape,” he says.

He says data sits in silos, with gaps and overlaps and no common standards.

He is calling for a federated data system led by the Environmental Protection Agency, letting different datasets be pulled together geospatially as needed.

He says the job could take a decade and cost about $1 billion, but new technologies such as remote sensing could transform the system.

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