A new report saying New Zealand focuses too much on climate change is muddled and superficial, Environment Commissioner Jan Wright says.
The Green Party has also criticised the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) report, saying it fails to join the dots when looking at environment challenges.
The report said New Zealand's environmental priorities were "not well targeted" and improving urban air quality and protecting biodiversity and ecosystems should be the highest priority.
"This is because of the high loss of life quality and premature death from the former and the high proportion of species at risk that are unique to New Zealand."
Meeting international climate change obligations and working to achieve an international agreement were also important, but reducing greenhouse gases was not.
"Water demand management and water allocation rank high because of their potential to affect availability and cost of water for production and consumption processes."
Waste reduction and waste management business support should also be a low priority because "landfill space and the employment pool have high substitutability and limited externalities".
NZIER questioned the prominence of some sustainability policies of recent years.
"Overall, we suggest the need for some rebalancing of climate change policy away from a focus on emissions reduction."
Dr Wright said the report was fundamentally flawed, muddled and superficial and she "couldn't agree less" that climate change should be low priority.
"Climate change is the biggest environmental challenge of our time. I am shocked and disappointed to see a report suggesting otherwise."
Prioritising environment challenges was needed and Dr Wright said she gave a speech about it last year but the NZIER analysis was "very poor. It is too superficial to lead to well-reasoned priorities".
Dr Wright said the report ignored the fact a strong emissions trading scheme would help meet costs for international obligations with the least cost to taxpayers.
Green co-leader Russel Norman said it was nonsense to think obligations could be met without reducing emissions.
"We cannot pull the wool over the world's eyes, pretending to be a team player without contributing to the team effort."
Dr Norman said the report did not consider economic opportunities for moving to a more green economy or the costs of not acting.
He said the report did not see the link between areas. Suggesting air quality and biodiversity should be a priorities ignored that climate change was the biggest long-term risk to biodiversity and reducing emissions improved air quality.
Environment Minister Nick Smith told Radio New Zealand this morning that sustainability had been a "mushy" catch-cry for 20 years under the Resource Management Act.
The NZIER report was taking the environment debate a "new leap forward".
"That's saying actually we need to do better than just the soft fuzzy sustainability, we need to have some robust analysis around priorities," he said.
"When you're 0.2 percent of global emissions you can reduce your emissions completely and that is not going to substantially change the future climate."
NZIER was right to focus on biodiversity, Dr Smith said.
A number of species in New Zealand were unique and "on the brink of extinction".
