Science Media Centre

Who would’ve thought freshwater would be a major election issue this year? Alongside the tragic deaths from synthetic drugs, freshwater, biosecurity, earthquakes and volcanoes have all made a show in the year’s top science stories. Some of last year’s stories have continued to draw headlines, including the Kaikōura earthquake, Havelock North campylobacter outbreak and Predator […]

As the one year anniversary of the Kaikōura earthquake nears, GNS scientist Dr Ursula Cochran writes on The Spinoff why it’s important to mark the anniversaries of earthquakes, even ones that happened 300 years ago. An excerpt (read in full): Measuring how far we’ve come as a nation in living wisely with earthquakes is a […]

2017 has been a sizzler for Australia, showing global warming is alive and well, but as Dr Jim Salinger writes in the NZ Herald, both Australian and New Zealand governments are failing on climate action. An excerpt (read in full): As Australia sizzles and the ice on our Southern Alps shrink what climate action is […]

Deputy Director of the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre Dr Andy Reisinger offers a rebuttal in the NZ Herald to a column published on Tuesday. An excerpt (read in full): As a climate scientist, I strongly rebut Tuesday’s opinion piece by Robin Grieve who claimed he was relating facts from the Motu Research […]

Massey University’s Dr Andy Towers is tired of hearing that New Zealand has a ‘youth drinking culture’, he writes in the Dominion Post. Drinking isn’t a ‘youth culture issue’, it’s a New Zealand culture issue. An excerpt (read in full): A potted history of New Zealand shows we’ve always had an alcohol problem. In colonial […]

Two environmental issues have dominated the news so far this election year, both focused on waterways, writes Massey University’s Associate Professor Ian Fuller in Hawkes Bay Today. An excerpt (read in full): Serious storms and flooding – and the resulting economic costs – have focused attention on the effects of climate change, while events like […]

The immense polarisation of opinions on immunisation has been highlighted through the response to Dr Lance O’Sullivan’s protest of an anti-vaccination documentary, GP Dr Cathy Stephenson writes on stuff.co.nz. An excerpt (read in full): There are people in both camps whose views won’t be shifted – that’s fine by me. We live in a world […]

We can have a profitable agricultural sector and protect the environment, writes AgResearch chief executive Tom Richardson, we just need to use science.  An excerpt (read in full): As the head of a science organisation which is focused on solving that conundrum I see our role in this being clear, and critically important. Science needs to lead the […]

Events like floods and droughts are not just figures in Treasury spreadsheets, writes Professor Dave Frame, the risks of them are changing and we need to understand how quickly they’re doing so. An excerpt (read in full): This comparison between the climate as it is today and as it might have been in a world […]

Massey University’s Associate Professor Ian Fuller says we need to build up knowledge of past flood events so that we can better understand the risk of future events. An excerpt (read in full): So, another “500-year” flood event in the Bay of Plenty. The last was in 2005 at Matata. Of course, this doesn’t mean that […]