From your mayor - Natural assets: our common wealth

It’s time to take a look at natural prosperity in Christchurch. I’m constantly amazed at how impressed tourists are with what Christchurch has to offer.

Surprisingly, it is usually the features that most of us just take for granted as part of our natural environment.

Virtually every foreign visitor comes from places that are bigger, dirtier and more built-up than Christchurch.

They are almost always awe-struck at the amount of space and ease of privacy and access to nature available here in Christchurch.

These are things we just accept as the way things are.

When I talk to tourists it always provides me with a fresh reminder that to another set of eyes this is a place that, in natural terms, is prosperous and increasingly rare in the wider world.

It is these features that are providing a draw-c card for the small, but significant, increase in highly skilled immigrants who are electing to move here after quite frequently first visiting as tourists.

I think that when we look at the way we take this rich natural environment possibly far too much for granted we would have to include, historically, the Christchurch City Council in this picture.

While we have practised good stewardship of our abundance of parks, reserves and gardens, it has been in recent years only that a real appreciation of what assets these are has started to emerge.

That’s probably a perfectly reasonable track record to have.

As Christchurch has become a more active player in the changing global economy that we have really been forced to take stock of both our strengths and weaknesses as a city.

There are some areas, such as the efforts of our waterways people to encourage both the reclamation and community enhancement of streams and rivers, that are already drawing positive international interest.

It is worth noting that since we started to replant our water systems in native foliage we have also enjoyed a major return of native birds to within the city.

There are actually not that many cities in the world that are enjoying a yearly increase in native wildlife.

As I said during the APEC conference, we may, in fact, be the only city in the world voluntarily re-building some of our swamp areas.

The great thing about this retention and enhancement of our natural assets is that they add up to resources that everyone can get to.

Quite simply, when you look at our natural environment we have a level of wealth that often only the very affluent can access overseas. Here it is available to everyone.

In the national Mayors for Jobs project that I chair, we have been trying to all broaden our ideas about how we look at work and how we define it.

Increasingly I think we will also find that as a city we will need to widen our definition of prosperity to place a more realistic value on our superb environment.

When we learn to do this we will then be able to have a more balanced view about how rich in natural assets we are as a city.

I think the reactions of the tourists are giving us a message we would do well to listen to.