The next government now has a mandate and a responsibility to clean up our rivers.

OPINION: Whatever the new government, this was the Environment Election The specials are in and the speculation is nearly over.

After months of fireworks and plot twists resembling something out of a certain New Zealand soap opera, we've finally come to the cliffhanger.

Whatever the make-up of the new government, the 2017 general election will go down in history as the Environment Election. We saw rivers take front and centre stage, and climate change labelled as the nuclear free moment of this generation.

The significance of both Bill English and Jacinda Ardern speaking of the environment in their election night speeches shouldn't be overlooked. Neither should the fact that all four of the parties involved in the negotiations have pledged to improve New Zealand's environmental performance.

READ MORE: Environment, climate change and foreign ownership on the agenda in coalition talks



The next government now has a mandate and a responsibility to clean up our rivers and take meaningful action on the climate. And that's a great thing, because we desperately need 2018 to be the Year of Action.

We've reached a point where two-thirds of our monitored waterways are now considered unsafe to swim in, full of e.coli and nitrate pollution from the ever-expanding dairy industry, fuelled by big irrigation and the explosion of cow numbers.

We've also seen our climate emissions rise so rapidly that unless we make big changes really soon, there's no way we'll meet our Paris Agreement targets other than by buying our way out on the international carbon market.

This election needs to be our cross roads – 'business as usual' with policies of climate denial and river degradation is no longer an option.

The recently leaked Ministry for the Environment report on sea level rise provides a frightening glimpse of what's to come.

Tipped for release post-election, but then leaked before it, the report estimates that $19 billion of property is at risk and 130,000 people could be directly affected by sea level rise.

Already this year, the cost of significant weather events in New Zealand is sitting at around $200 million. It's so high that 2017 is heading to be the most expensive year for weather events since records began.

Science tells us that as the climate continues to warm, we'll see more extreme and more frequent weather events, like that of Edgecumbe, Houston, the Caribbean, and South Asia.

The world's authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says we'll also see increasing pressure on food and water security, greater risks to human health, a decreased ability to deal with poverty, and significant displacement of people.

Without additional mitigation efforts beyond those in place today, the IPCC warns that warming by the end of this century will lead to a "high or very high risk" of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts.

This is science speak for bad news: The Day After Tomorrow is actually happening right now.

So while it's good that parties involved in coalition negotiations say our environment and rivers are important, what we now need from a new government is tangible policies.

We need policies that are the polar opposite of what we're currently doing, which is inviting oil companies to scour our seabed for the oil that science says needs to stay in the ground if we're to avoid a climate catastrophe.

Just last week, the world's largest oil exploration company, Schlumberger, applied to search for oil across a monstrous 19,000 square-kilometres of the Taranaki Basin, including in and around the critically endangered Māui dolphin and New Zealand Blue Whale habitat.

Schlumberger will sell information it gathers to oil giants, including Austrian OMV, which is on the list of only 100 companies in the world that are causing 71 per cent of global emissions.

Taking action on the environment means rejecting mad applications like this.

It means a commitment to keep most of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, and it means not searching for new reserves. It means significant investment in renewables and sustainable transport, and widespread planting of permanent, indigenous forests.

It means reducing the cow herd and bringing agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme instead of subsidising its emissions at a cost to taxpayers of half a billion dollars a year. It

means culling the current Government's $480 Irrigation Fund - a subsidy to intensive dairying - and instead investing it into ecological agriculture. Let's stop subsidising our own destruction!

It means transforming New Zealand into a net zero carbon society and economy over the next 30 years by putting climate and environmental considerations at the front and centre of our social and economic strategy.

The state of our environment is the key issue of our time. It affects every aspect of how we live, and we need an all-of- government and all-of- society approach to tackle it.

We can do it, but we have to start today. The day after tomorrow is too late.

Russel Norman is Greenpeace executive director and a former co-leader of the Green Party.