A shot of cash can help save our natural capital
In 2012, Sir David Attenborough, reflecting on 60 years of natural history film-making, said: ‘‘For me, as for countless others, the natural world is the greatest of all treasures. And yet, in my lifetime, we have damaged it more severely than in the whole of human history.’’
Attenborough’s observations apply wherever human activity is focused on extracting and maximising economic benefit from the natural world.
However, relatively few of these activities are ecologically sustainable, and even in our country we have a legacy of ongoing habitat destruction.
The natural capital that we deplete today provides fewer choices for future generations, as ecosystems become more disturbed, less biodiverse, less resilient, and more vulnerable.
That is why the Government’s announcement of $140 million from the Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) for the West Coast transition from coal is farsighted. This is the West Coast’s second ecological package. In 2001, $92m was invested to transition from native-forest harvesting. It highlights the important concept that capital is necessary to help local communities transition to more ecologically sustainable industries – substantial capital that only a government can provide.
Otherwise, as occurred in the 1980s free-market reforms, small communities bear the heavy economic and social costs of abrupt regulatory change. These communities are heavily dependent on primary industries.
This is the case for pine harvesting, which is pouring millions of tons of topsoil into streams and coastal areas, in places like the East Coast and Marlborough Sounds, which depend on forestry.
But in these areas the land is too unstable, soils too erodible, and the clear-felling and tracking too corrosive to retain topsoil, leading to significant impacts in sensitive ecosystems.
In the Marlborough Sounds, community groups and industry are preparing a $50m PGF proposal to create a trust to address legacy and transition issues in an equitable way. With appropriate representation, governance, and operating principles, the trust would buy cutting or replanting rights, install coastal setbacks of at least 100m, and retire steep erosion-prone faces.
It would also foster new economic opportunities such as walking and bike trails, ma¯ nuka honey, alternative forestry, ecotourism and nature conservation.
The PGF could also play a critical role in solving the largest environmental issue by scale that New Zealand faces outside of climate change.
Every year within our coastal waters alone, over a million kilometres of heavy trawl equipment criss-crosses the sea floor, impacting fragile reef-forming organisms, and stirring up sediment plumes.
The government’s own reporting shows the scale of damage to our seabed ecosystems from 1990 to 2014 is comparable to that of the Brazilian Amazon. The damage over millions of hectares varies in intensity, frequency, and patchiness, just like deforestation, and the actual area can only be estimated from voyage data.
Our scientists have also shown that biodiverse marine habitats that capture carbon, cycle nutrients, stabilise sediments, and provide shelter and feeding areas for marine life, are being hammered.
These ecosystems are the marine equivalent of old-growth forests, the wondrous longlived sponge gardens, horse-mussel beds, and coral-like reefs, which provide complex biodiverse habitats. So what, you might ask? Why shouldn’t I be able to eat affordable terakihi, snapper and monkfish?
This is eerily reminiscent of the desire for rimu floors in the days of clear-felling native forests, where old-growth habitat was cut down over thousands of hectares.
Marine biologist Sylvia Earle describes it like this: ‘‘Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life. It’s akin to using a bulldozer to catch a butterfly, destroying a whole ecosystem for the sake of a few pounds of protein.’’
New Zealand has an international-scale environmental issue, which we have not been ready to acknowledge. The PGF offers a timely and appropriate capital mechanism to help the fishing industry transition away from bottom-trawling.
So rather than using the influence of political donations to stall the inevitable evolution towards ecological sustainability, an industry proposal in partnership with local communities to ensure enduring fishing jobs would be more futurefocused.
This collaborative approach is essential if New Zealand is to meet its international biodiversity obligations, most recently reaffirmed in Egypt by the minister of conservation.
In launching the NZ Biodiversity Strategy in 2000, then prime minister Helen Clark said: ‘‘Biodiversity is everyone’s business.’’
The PGF offers a unique opportunity to invest in local community wellbeing, and to move to a future that the next David Attenborough might highlight as an exemplar in the coming age of habitat restoration.
Biodiverse marine habitats that capture carbon, cycle nutrients, stabilise sediments, and provide shelter and feeding areas for marine life, are being hammered.