Source: Statistics New Zealand
Environmental-economic accounts: Data to 2024 – information release
5 March 2026
Environmental-economic accounts show how our environment contributes to our economy, the impacts of economic activity on our environment, and how we respond to environmental issues.
Stats NZ’s environmental-economic accounts show the interactions between the environment and the economy to provide a clearer understanding of environmental-economic pressures, dependencies, trade-offs, and impacts. It is done within the United Nations’ System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) framework, which specifies how environmental data can be integrated coherently with economic data from the System of National Accounts.
All accounts are expressed in current prices for the year ended March.
Key facts
In the year ended March 2024:
- total environmental taxes were $6.0 billion, most of which were transport (50.4 percent) and energy (44.9 percent) taxes. From 2023 to 2024, environmental taxes increased 14.3 percent ($748 million).
- the marine economy contributed $5.2 billion to New Zealand’s gross domestic product (GDP). This was an increase of 7.4 percent compared with 2023. The contribution of the marine economy to GDP in 2024 was 1.2 percent.
- the total asset value of renewable energy was $11.9 billion. Hydro generation made up 67.8 percent of total asset value, followed by geothermal (20.2 percent).
- central and local government expenditure on environmental protection (on a final consumption basis) increased 9.8 percent ($277 million) to total $3.1 billion. Local government contributed 66.9 percent ($2.1 billion) to this total, and central government contributed 33.1 percent ($1.0 billion).
