New Zealand marked the first anniversary of its worst ever maritime environmental disaster Friday, with the government renewing a pledge to restore the area affected by the oil spill from the Liberian-registered container ship Rena.

Environment Minister Amy Adams paid tribute to the hard work and collegiality of local councils, iwi (Maori tribal groups), businesses and the thousands of volunteers who came together to help minimise the impact of the grounding and resulting oil spill off the east coast of the North Island.

"Situations like this can bring out the best in people, and so it has been the case here. The work is far from finished, however, and our goal now is to restore the Bay of Plenty environment back to its pre-Rena state," Adams said in a statement.

An environmental recovery plan to address the long-term effects of the grounding had made good progress, she said.

The plan identified the environmental issues for the beaches, seabed, water, fisheries, wildlife and management of waste and set out who was responsible for the recovery and monitoring of each.

A governance group had been established to oversee the implementation of the plan and to make sure everything possible could be done to restore the environment.

Several scientific monitoring projects were also underway to get a better understanding of the environmental impacts of the Rena grounding.

The research would evaluate the success of clean-up techniques, help to inform oil spill response operations and provide a wealth of knowledge about New Zealand's coastal environment, she said.

A wildlife program would undertake impact assessments and initiate a habitat restoration for sensitive eco-systems where endangered species were breeding.

At the peak of the response, more than 400 birds were cared for at a wildlife facility. The birds had been returned to their natural habitat and would be tracked to assess their recovery.

Salvors have begun recovering steel from the vessel, which lies broken in two on the Astrolabe Reef, and have recovered more than 1,000 containers from the ship

On Tuesday, the government and Daina Shipping Company, which owns the Rena, announced they had agreed that Daina will pay 27.6 million NZ dollars (22.68 million U.S. dollars) towards the public costs of the clean-up.

The settlement also recognized that Daina and The Swedish Club, which insured the Rena, were investigating the environmental, social, cultural and economic impacts of different options for dealing with the wreck.

This included leaving part of the wreck in place, in which case they would make an additional payment of 10.4 million NZ dollars to the government, reflecting their reduced salvage costs.

On Thursday, the government announced an independent review would examine the response of shipping authority Maritime New Zealand to the grounding and establish the factors that contributed to, or limited, its effectiveness.

The Rena's Filipino captain and navigation officer were both jailed in May for seven months on charges relating to the grounding, but have since been released and returned home.

Captain Mauro Balomaga and navigation officer Leonil Relon had previously admitted to charges under the Crimes Act of willfully attempting to pervert the course of justice, the Maritime Act for operating a vessel in a way that cause unnecessary danger and the Resource Management Act for discharging harmful contaminants into a marine area.

It was revealed in court that the ship's insurers had been paying 10 million U.S. dollars a month to clean up the environmental mess left by the grounding.

The Rena spilled hundreds of tonnes of oil into the sea along with cargo containers and their contents, killing an unknown number of New Zealand's native birds and prompted a massive clean- up of oil and debris from beaches around the port city of Tauranga.

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