This document is a summary of a much larger report. During the course of this project, MoRST commissioned a number of reports and held a number of workshops.
The overall approach in this project has been to look at the economy and the environment from the perspectives of “drivers” and “responses”. There are many drivers that can influence the future state of the economy and the environment, but our scan identifies these three as being significant now, with the likelihood they will become even more significant in the next two decades or so:
- energy use and greenhouse gas emissions
- water and food production, and
- urbanisation.
The signals from the drivers strongly suggest that production and consumption patterns cannot continue as they are. This is becoming clear to societies around the world and responses to these drivers are occurring in many countries. The responses part of this report focuses on:
- consumer trends
- how businesses are responding
- changing patterns of investment
- government interventions, and
- how science is responding.
This report considers how each of these responses relates to New Zealand as an exporting nation, and the implications for New Zealand’s science system. This work attempts to look forward 20 years. We acknowledge that in some areas, like consumer trends, predicting the future is difficult.