The health of Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland’s natural environment in 2025
Author:
Auckland Council Environmental Evaluation and Monitoring Unit, EEMUSource:
Auckland Council Environmental Evaluation and Monitoring Unit, EEMU | Engineering, Assets and Technical Advisory DepartmentPublication date:
2025Topics:
EnvironmentTe oranga o te taiao o Tāmaki Makaurau. The health of Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland’s natural environment in 2025. A synthesis of Auckland Council’s state of the environment reporting
Extract:
Kupu whakataki
Introduction
Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland has a diverse and much-loved natural environment. Hosting Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest city, one that continues to grow quickly, it is an environment under inevitable stress. How we live, work and interact with our natural places creates pressures that can reduce environmental quality and resilience, ultimately diminishing the legacy for future generations.
We have been producing regular, comprehensive State of the Environment (SOE) reports for the region since 1999. The reports allow us to understand our environmental impacts, both negative and positive. A single, integrated report helps us make sense of the data collected across all the different parts of the environment and focus in on the issues that matter most to Aucklanders. This report is both a report card on how successfully we are managing our natural environment now, and an insight into emerging problems we face that can inform our future actions and investment.
This State of the Environment report is an important input to Council’s planning and work programmes to ensure our investment responds to key environmental issues to ensure a resilient future.
Making good planning and investment decisions for our natural environment requires that we understand the underlying causes of environmental issues and current and future risks. This can be more complex than it sounds. For most issues, we need long-term monitoring so we can detect any trends and consider relationships to other factors, including variation and change caused by natural factors such as weather events and seasonal climate conditions.
The need for robust environmental knowledge through monitoring has been recognised nationally. Section 35 of the Resource Management Act requires Auckland Council (and all other regional councils and unitary authorities) to monitor the natural environment. Data collected by Auckland Council feeds into national environmental reporting (managed by the Ministry for the Environment under the Environmental Reporting Act) to inform government priorities and to understand if Tāmaki Makaurau has similar issues to other regions. For more information on the issues for New Zealand, see Our Environment 2025.
State of the Environment monitoring and reporting generates knowledge to inform Auckland Council decisions on where to prioritise our response, actions and funding. That knowledge supports and provides a measure of progress achieved through delivery of seven areas of council services identified in the Long-term Plan 2024-2034: Natural Environment, Water, Transport, Community, Built Environment, Economic and Cultural Development and Well Managed Local Government.
State of the Environment monitoring data improves our understanding of the natural environment and provides an evidence base for decision making and planning. It also helps us to measure environmental progress holistically by integrating across environmental domains and the region. State of the Environment monitoring directly provides data, analysis and progress measures for:
- Auckland Plan 2050
- Auckland Unitary Plan
- Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri: Auckland’s Climate Plan
- Māori values reporting by Houkura (Independent Māori Statutory Board)
- State of the Gulf reporting by the Hauraki Gulf Forum
- State of the Waitākere Ranges Heritage Area reporting.
Te Tāruke-ā-Tāwhiri: Auckland’s Climate Plan, had significant mātauranga input from mana whenua and has at its heart a cultural narrative that is deeply embedded in this place – Tāmaki Makaurau. Within this is shared a whakapapa centred approach to climate resilience and to sustaining the natural balance with tūpuna Atua and increasing the mauri of te taiao (environment). This is also reflected in Te Haumanu Taiao (an ecological restoration guide for Tāmaki).
The knowledge and wisdom of Iwi Mana Whenua, passed through whakapapa and deep connections to te taiao, is fundamental to lifting the mauri of te taiao and for sustaining life. This report does not attempt to incorporate and report mātauranga māori. It provides information from environmental monitoring that can sit alongside mātauranga and support mana whenua and others in achieving better outcomes for te taiao and ourselves. Mātauranga provides a long-term context and deep understanding of place that our more recent monitoring can nest within and add to. We are increasingly working in partnership with mana whenua and there is a strength of narrative that comes from joining our monitoring and knowledge that will be needed as climate change continues to challenge us.
Navigating this report
What is happening in our economy, in our communities and with our climate is connected in many ways to the pressure placed on our natural resources and the quality of the environment we enjoy.
There are primary drivers of environmental change (like population growth) that produce specific pressures (like housing demand, earthworks and more emissions from traffic) that affect the state of our environment and specific resources, places and values, and these define most State of the Environment
reports that generally adopt a DPSIR (driver – pressure – state – impact – response) reporting framework – or some variant of that framework.
First, we consider the interconnected drivers and pressures of population growth, land use change and intensification, and climate variability and change.
Second, we report on how these drivers and pressures manifest in the state and trends of core natural environments, ecosystems and biodiversity across:
- Our Air
- Our Land
- Our Freshwater
- Our Coasts.
We report Auckland Council’s responses to the issues identified through the monitoring results. Some of these responses are broad and seek to address many risks often over the long term while others are specific to particular issues or places and seek more immediate results.
While we report within a general DPSIR framework, the environmental issues are always complex and inter-related. This report’s response to that complexity is to identify and discuss themes, case studies and integrated responses throughout the report. These aim to provide information in an accessible way and highlight connections between cause, effect and response.
Council collects a wealth of information across its many monitoring programmes. This report is a summary and synthesis only. Detailed technical reports for our environmental monitoring programmes are referenced in the report and available on Knowledge Auckland. We hope you explore these as well if you are interested.
Additional broader information that may be of interest in understanding the context of our environment in Tāmaki Makaurau is listed below.
Safeswim (recreational water quality): Safeswim enables people to make informed decisions on when and where to swim. It provides access to real-time information on faecal contamination, swimming conditions and safety hazards for popular swimming locations. Check Safeswim to swim safely at your favourite swimming spots.
Heritage: Since 2018, Auckland’s Heritage Counts has reported annually to highlight key statistics and research on heritage places and buildings.
Population Demographics: Tāmaki Makaurau specific demographic information and trends from the New Zealand Census of Population and Dwellings can be found in the 2023 Auckland Summary reports.
Tiaki Tāmaki Makaurau Conservation Auckland is an online resource to support Aucklanders in protecting and restoring our environment. It offers information on local history, conservation initiatives, practical guidance, and community involvement opportunities.
Looking back
It has been 25 years since the first comprehensive State of the Environment report was produced for the Auckland region. It promised a “snapshot of the region at the end of the millennium”. Similar reports have been produced every five years since, and 2025 provides us the opportunity to look back on how Tāmaki Makaurau, and the issues it faces, has changed over the first quarter century of the new millennium.
The 1999 report had the region’s 1996 population at just over 1.1 million. The 2024 population is over 1.79 million – an increase of over 600,000 people in 25 years. The 1999 Tāmaki Makaurau population was growing at about twice the national rate, and it was forecast to grow from 30 to 39 per cent of the national population by 2041 (see next section for where we are today).
Environmental issues identified in 1999 were similar to those reported in this 2025 report. Air quality issues, impacts on native ecosystems, plant and animal pests, risks to rivers and harbours from earthworks, pollution events, pressure on ground and surface water, beach water quality and natural hazards were all described as issues for Tāmaki Makaurau in 1999 and as set out in this report, remain of concern today. Environmental change can be slow and happen over many years and decades. As we move through this current report, the 1999 report provides a useful marker in time to look back to and understand how much Tāmaki Makaurau has changed and what the impacts have been on our environment.
We also compare changes in the five years since the last State of the Environment Report.
Read previous State of the Environment reports.
Auckland Council, 11 September 2025
See also
Related Auckland Council technical reports
Analysis of sediment yields for the Auckland region (2009-2024)
Auckland’s greenhouse gas inventory to 2023. State of the environment reporting, TR2025/14
Beach change in the Auckland region: current state and trends. State of the environment reporting, TR2025/13
Soil quality and trace elements in the Auckland region, 2018-2022. State of the environment reporting, TR2025/23
Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland east coast subtidal reef monitoring report: 2007 to 2024. State of the environment reporting, TR2025/24
Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland intertidal reef monitoring report: 2011 to 2024. State of the environment reporting, TR2025/25
Wetland ecological integrity in Tāmaki Makaurau 2010-2024. State of the environment reporting, TR2025/18
Key findings
Hau / Air
- Overall air quality is good, and the trends are positive.
- Traffic pollution is still decreasing, particularly in the CBD.
- Reductions in particulate pollution have slowed down in the last five years.
- Between 2016 and 2023, greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 9.5 per cent for gross and 8.3 per cent for net emissions.
- Greenhouse gas emissions are dominated by the transport and energy sectors.
Whenua / Land
- Findings highlight potential for biodiversity gains through effective control of pest mammals and plants, and enhancing forest extent and connectivity across Tāmaki Makaurau.
- Indigenous forest and scrubland have increased by 1 percentage point (+5550 ha) from 2018 to 2023, now covering 27 per cent of the region.
- Abundance and richness of native plant and bird species have increased in forest and wetland sites especially where pest animals have been effectively controlled and in areas dominated by indigenous vegetation.
- Most bird species in forest and wetlands are native.
- Wetland conditions have improved slightly, but 88 per cent of wetlands are experiencing pressure from catchment modifications, reduced water quality, stock access, exotic plants and pest mammals.
- Soil quality has not improved, including in our agricultural areas where soil quality is poor.
- Since the 1970s, Auckland has lost over a third of its highly productive land to development, and much of what remains, is now fragmented into small parcels.
Wai Māori / Freshwater
- Many rainfall sites received much less rainfall than the previous five years but extreme rainfall events in the 2022/2023 summer masked overall drier trends.
- Groundwater levels are reflecting both the overall drying and the extreme rainfall events.
- River flows and trends varied for individual rivers; all were impacted by extreme rainfall.
- Sediment loads were high during storms, especially in steeper catchments with pastoral land cover.
- Lake water quality is generally declining from already poor conditions.
- High nutrients and faecal contamination are the most widespread water quality issues across rural and urban rivers, with high metals in urban areas and many sites are degrading.
- Stream ecological health ranges from ‘excellent’ in native forest streams to ‘fair’ in many rural areas to ‘poor’ in streams with intensive rural and urban land use.
- Groundwater quality remains a concern in Pukekohe with longstanding elevated nitrate concentrations and in urban aquifers receiving stormwater discharges.
Te takutai moana / Coasts
- Water quality is good to excellent at the coast and estuary mouths, fair in the mid-estuary and poor in upper estuary and tidal creeks, though most locations have improved over time.
- Marine sediment contamination is encouragingly stable—increased urbanisation has not resulted in increased contamination.
- Ecological health is generally declining in estuaries due to increases in sedimentation.
- There were some locations where poor estuarine health improved.
- Subtidal reefs are showing widespread declines in ecological health, likely driven by climate related stressors like marine heatwaves and extreme weather events.
- Our beaches are changing, and long-term erosion is a problem at many, but not all as the conditions that affect our beaches are diverse.