The power of youth to show the way

lecturer in environmental management at Lincoln University

When Greta Thunberg undertook her solo vigil outside the Swedish Parliament, she highlighted the failure of my generation. Her demand for meaningful action on climate change has come to symbolise that we are collectively letting down our youth, and those who will follow.

Here, the Easter release of Environment Aotearoa 2019 unsurprisingly revealed a similarly perilous picture of ecological devastation and decline. Solutions are needed for our continuing mismanagement of soils, fresh water, and marine environments.

And they are out there, but their adoption is being stymied.

Our youth are also now holding us to account, and are coming up with novel and pragmatic solutions.

Take the Marlborough Girls’ College’s ‘‘Marine Team’’. They have devised a legislative solution to better protect our marine environments.

They recently published, in the Resource Management Law Association’s

prestigious resource management journal, innovative ideas to cut through the systemic political impasse.

The team identified that communities need to be empowered to manage their marine areas. They developed a model of Marine Guardians, who would have the statutory authority to run a marine protected areas process within a region.

Guardians would comprise iwi and central and local government appointees, and community-elected representatives, tasked to run an inclusive and time-bound consultation process. They would be supported by an advisory group, involving tangata whenua, fishers, tourism operators, local residents, youth, marine industries, and marine experts.

The guardians would prepare a spatial plan for ministerial approval, which would identify seabed reserves, species sanctuaries, recreational reserves, ma¯ taitai, taia¯ pure and no-take reserves.

Their role wouldn’t end there, however, as they would have the authority to implement measures to assist in the preservation, protection, and sustainable management of the marine environment.

To achieve this, the team envisages these guardians taking a collaborative, ecosystem-led approach, underpinned by long-term monitoring and research.

Although they have focused on the Marlborough Sounds, which urgently needs more marine protection as it only has one small marine reserve covering less than 0.001 per cent of Marlborough’s coastal waters, the team’s model would fit well with any part of the country.

These young people are showing the way and they deserve to be heard. They will undoubtedly come up against aged cynicism, be patronised as naive, and dismissed for their youth. They are entitled to retort ‘‘so what is your solution to our biodiversity decline?’’

Fishing interests are likely to oppose this as they will not want to see their power and control over our marine management loosened. However, their reliance on being out of sight and out of mind is coming back to haunt them. Public trust in fishing will inevitably decline beyond the ‘‘cameras on boats’’ issue, as the breath-taking scale of environmental damage in Environment Aotearoa becomes better understood.

Over the last century, the aquatic clear-felling practices of bottom-trawling and dredging have caused the greatest environmental damage and destruction over all our ecosystems.

It is time the fishing industry committed to working with their communities for greater marine protection in the short term, and phasing out bottomtrawling

over most, if not all, of our entire marine environment.

The Government can support fishers to adapt and innovate, given the legacy issues of past management and incentives which have enabled these practices and resulted in massive habitat loss.

If the Government does not proactively act, there is significant change coming to marine management anyway. The Court of Appeal is shortly to consider whether regional councils have legislative power to maintain biodiversity within the marine environment.

Whatever the outcome, a new way of working in partnership with local communities is inevitable. The Marine Team has made a great contribution to the success of this.

Sir David Attenborough recently said about climate change: ‘‘There is a message for all of us in the voices of these young people. It is, after all, their generation that will inherit this dangerous legacy.’’

In the face of climate disruption, our marine ecosystems need to be as intact and resilient as possible. We have to manage them much better so that biodiversity recovers where it can.

Environment Aotearoa shows we need to listen to our youth. Because, as Attenborough also says, there is still hope, if we act now.