On This Programme

The annual Youth Environment Forum in Wellington is a five day event for 15 to 18-year-olds, run by the Ministry for the Environment in partnership with Sir Peter Blake Trust. The forum is an opportunity for the students to raise concerns about the environment, talk to each other and government representatives and investigate environmental strategies they can take back to their schools and communities.

The 44 students from around the country work on practical projects - this year, Household Sustainability, Sustainable Land and Water Use and Sustainable Tourism. They presented their findings at an official presentation ceremony at the end of the forum. Amelia Nurse visited the Household Sustainability group as they embarked on a "Waste Audit".

The Household Sustainability group prepares for the waste audit.
Students from the Household Sustainability group don protective gear before embarking on a waste audit.

Waste audit
The students sorted, categorised and reviewed the waste to determine where waste could be reduced, for example, by avoiding non-recyclable packaging.

Brown TroutJohn Hayes is a fisheries scientist who studies trout at the Cawthron Institute in Nelson. A lifelong angler, he is also author of The Artful Science of Trout Fishing. He took Dacia Herbulock to the banks of the Maitai River to demonstrate his electric fishing technique which allows scientists to monitor the type and abundance of fish species in a river location.

In the second part of this feature, John Hayes explains some of the reasons behind falling trout numbers, and talks about creating computer models of trout behaviour.
Image: Brown trout, from Wikipedia

Andrew Campbell is a mechanical engineer who started out with a strong interest in alternative transport fuels. He moved on to integrated energy systems design, particularly for distributed power generation, then government policy development. He's currently interested in understanding the societal drivers for change and developing the technology accordingly. This has taken him to 14 countries working for groups such as the World Bank, United Nations and the Asian Development Bank. He's one of the principal managers of a large research programme looking at what indigenous energy resource options New Zealand has, and how they could be best used in view of societal drivers. Amelia Nurse asks him what's behind current energy trends and what the future might be like.