How NZ can do conservation better
Every time I go into our mountains or forests I’m reminded that our biodiversity continues to decline. Despite employing some of the world’s best conservation managers, DOC doesn’t have the resources to manage the public conservation estate.
Conservation in Aotearoa New Zealand requires active management because of the many threats our biodiversity faces. Merely locking an area up as public conservation land will not sustain its biodiversity. DOC would need its budget quadrupled to have any chance of addressing these threats.
Unfortunately, many in government and the environmental movement don’t understand this and argue for even more land to be added to the public conservation estate. And if they can’t do that, they push for planning rules to restrict private use (the proposed indigenous biodiversity National Policy Statement).
But this fails to recognise the realities of Aotearoa New Zealand today, especially that native biodiversity requires proactive management rather than just tenure change or restrictive planning rules. Threats such as stoats, myrtle rust or climate change are not influenced by whether the land is public or private, or whether there are rules prohibiting particular types of use.
Rather, these threats occur across all land tenures and planning frameworks. Legal ‘‘protection’’ does not equate to successful biodiversity conservation. If it did, then DOC would require minimal funding because public conservation land is already ‘‘protected’’.
The fallacy of assuming that statute and regulation alone can achieve positive biodiversity conservation outcomes occurs for several reasons.
These include the impact of historical habitat loss and the still-fresh memories of recent major conservation battles (e.g. at Whirinaki); a strong perception that only government can manage public good values like native biodiversity; a deep-seated Western attachment to the notion that we need to separate nature from people; a lingering assumption/dream that we might be able to recreate some sort of pre-human condition in Aotearoa New Zealand and confusion over what conservation means in Aotearoa New Zealand (while legislation treats conservation and preservation as synonyms, they are in fact fundamentally very different).
It’s time that we recognise that none of these arguments are valid today. We urgently need to discard the fallacy of statute and regulation and adopt a new philosophy if we are to have any hope of sustaining, let along enhancing, our unique biodiversity.
We need to rethink the way we do conservation, especially on private land.
Simply creating more rules is the wrong way to engage landowners and motivate them to manage biodiversity, because if landowners don’t feel respected and supported, they will not spend their money looking after biodiversity.
To have any hope of sustaining, let alone enhancing our native biodiversity, we need to change our conservation model.
I have four suggestions:
1. Develop a 21st-century conservation vision that places people at the centre, which acknowledges both the past and the realities of Aotearoa New Zealand today, in looking to the future, and that focuses on sustainability and resilience rather than preservation.
2. Restructure how we manage conservation nationally by establishing a national conservation authority that sets policy, distributes funding and advocates for biodiversity conservation across all land tenures.
3. Shift the focus of biodiversity conservation on private land from a rules-based approach to one based on education and incentives. We need to empower those who have stewardship of land to want to look after their biodiversity, and celebrate them for doing this. A reliance on regulation is already failing on private land and will continue to fail.
4. Finally, we need to educate young Kiwis about what native biodiversity is, why it’s important and how it is vital to our lives. A greater focus on immersion-based biodiversity programmes in schools is needed to engender the sense of ownership of native biodiversity that will guarantee its long-term survival.
Partnerships should be the guiding principle for biodiversity conservation in Aotearoa New Zealand – not statute, tenure and rules.
We urgently need to shift the fundamental paradigm that guides biodiversity conservation from one that is based on the presumption that protection through statute and rules equals conservation, to one that is based on education and incentives, with people at the centre.
Simply creating more rules is the wrong way to engage landowners and motivate them to manage biodiversity, because if landowners don’t feel respected and supported, they will not spend their money looking after biodiversity.