Lifestyle and Leisure
Reasons to move: Environment
It is proudly a nuclear-free country, the Government has recently revealed that it plans to cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 and the country as a whole is made up of 14 national parks.
Yes, New Zealand can safely claim its credentials as a green and pleasant land.
New Zealand's main sources of power are hydroelectricity and geothermal electricity – between them, these renewable energy sources make up 70 per cent of the country's total electricity.
Over in the UK, we seem to be fighting a constant losing battle with the Government, planning chiefs and housing developers. Vast swathes of the country's green-belt land have already been swallowed up by rapidly expanding towns and monolithic concrete motorways jammed with cars going nowhere fast.
Whenever the Government is pressed to find an alternative to building on green-belt land, it instead waves aside the need to build in the cities through regeneration and revitalisation of the brown-field sites, instead suggesting 'Eco Towns' – where thousands of homes are planned for villages whose infrastructure cannot cope with the sudden influx of people and cars on the small roads.
In New Zealand, national parks are protected under the national parks Act 1980, which goes as far as to prohibit trespass in the parks unless a permit has been acquired in some cases.
In the UK, we too have several national parks, but it has taken several years for the Government to consider including the South Downs as a National Park; the reason for this is that the land is earmarked for yet more identikit housing, and this is the case across the country.
Indeed, the Government seems to be promising changes concerning climate change and carbon emissions, but doing precious little other than shifting from meeting to meeting without ever achieving anything. There is too much red tape involved and too much pandering to big business to ever make substantial changes.
That's not to say that New Zealand is perfect and the equivalent to a green oasis immune to the onslaught of development. It's just that there is a whole lot more green space to go around and fewer people to fill it, making New Zealand a candidate for the 'green and pleasant land' tag.
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