The National Environment Service has launched their Environmental Communication (Comms) Strategy, the start of a journey to deliver communication and updates of the agency to the public.

Environment relates to everyone on a day to day basis, “we feel that this obligation is on us to deliver,” said NES Director Halatoa Fua.

“In our role as a government agency, it is an obligation to communicate to our public, the taxpayers, in the work that we do,” said Fua.

NES has skilled staff with traditional and environmental knowledge, the Comms launch was the revamping of the NES processes, digitalizing it, and getting the staff on board - a lot of good work from everyone, said Fua.

Communications had been identified in their strategic plan as a key area that NES wanted to strengthen, also taking into account  survey results which came out “very loud and clear” that members of the public wanted to know more about the processes and what is required for permits, consents and approvals.

NES will strive to continue to improve their processes; compliance is an area they want to strengthen in assessments, and their obligations to the operators they’ll be training, once the proper guidelines are in place.

Due to the changing landscape, NES will also look at bringing up to date its National Policy and Amendments (since 2003).

Prime Minister Mark Brown and Government HOMs attended the launch which was held yesterday afternoon at the NES office.