Director-General’s overview
Successive governments have had the foresight to set aside forests, grasslands, freshwater and marine ecosystems for the benefit and enjoyment of all
New Zealanders. The Department of Conservation is tasked with the stewardship of these areas and New Zealand’s unique biodiversity for the public good.
The public investment in conservation has been motivated by the intrinsic value of nature protection. In essence, that means the value of nature for its own worth, where protection is the mark of a civilised society. This merges with the extrinsic value that comes from people enjoying New Zealand’s majestic and largely untouched landscapes, its unique bird, animal and plant life, and our historic and cultural interaction with that.
As New Zealand continues to develop its distinct nationhood, these are the images we reach for to define our national identity and grow our sense of national pride. They are also the things that fuel our point of difference in a competitive world, represented in the ‘clean and green’ and ‘100% Pure New Zealand’
brand marketing.
The brand has grown around international interest in New Zealand as a desirable destination for nature tourism. Tourism now accounts for about 10% of our economy and 18% of export earnings, and the asset base that underpins tourism is public conservation lands and waters.
So the Department has an additional dimension to its stewardship—as well as protecting nature for its intrinsic value, we seek to enhance the value that taxpayers receive from public conservation lands and waters. While there is always a balance to be struck between intrinsic and beneficial value, the two are not mutually exclusive. Preservation and prosperity are interdependent. The Department must be enabling of business opportunities, and businesses must accept the restraints and responsibilities that go with that, and try to capitalise on the benefits they can receive from being associated with conservation. This is so for the present, and more so if we are to protect the same options for future generations.
Over the last year we have been working with the tourism industry to construct a framework that will help to capitalise on these mutual interests, lifting the benefits to conservation from better engagement with conservation-related businesses. We have also been reassessing where and how we invest in recreation facilities with a view to increasing our responsiveness to domestic and international visitor flows. And we are reviewing the concessions framework to determine how the processes can be streamlined and applied consistently.
While the economic benefits conservation delivers through tourism are the most obvious example of added value, the Department is also looking to capitalise on new ways to achieve preservation and foster prosperity.
Climate change and the need to address the causes of it has been a rallying point for that reality. The emergence of an international carbon market has made us aware that a significant proportion of New Zealand’s existing carbon stock is on public conservation lands, and that there is potential to increase the overall carbon store. Establishing new forests through regeneration and planting does this in a way that contributes to offsetting New Zealand’s Kyoto obligations. Pest control to improve forest health and the restoration of carbon-sequestering vegetation such as tussock land has additional potential value.
Carbon markets are a starting point. What is emerging internationally is the broader concept of the value of biodiversity. Protecting and restoring degraded ecosystems has benefit because the health of ecosystems determines the quality and quantity of the services that flow from them. These are services such as freshwater yield, quality and flow; soil regeneration and stability; air quality; carbon storage; the nutrient cycle; pollination; fish stocks; and so on. There is an international focus on how land, water and ocean management can be achieved to protect these life-sustaining benefits through good environmental management to the benefit of those who extract their livelihood from natural resource use. The Department is engaged in this activity internationally.
On the domestic front, the Department, with other natural resource management agencies, was successful in a bid to the Cross Departmental Research Pool for work in this area. The research is focused on developing biodiversity offset mechanisms that will give businesses the opportunity to offset activity that unavoidably reduces biodiversity, similar to carbon-offsetting programmes. The 3-year research programme is expected to increase opportunities for businesses to operate on public conservation land, or to enter into business agreements with the Department, while providing benefits to conservation through off-setting schemes.
As well as working with business, the Department is committed to joining with the broad range of New Zealanders to lift the benefits to conservation. A priority is engaging with iwi to draw on mutual interests in conservation to create gains for both. A real highlight in the past year was the successful launch of the Tauira Kaitiaki Taiao cadetship, which has set 15 cadets on the road to 2 years of work experience and learning towards qualifications in conservation and tikanga Māori. Part of the cadetship’s significance is the partnership with Te Puni Kōkiri and Ngā Whenua Rāhui that helped develop it, and the promise it holds both for building Māori capability for conservation management, and for making a step change to the ways the Department and iwi can work together.
The Department’s core mandate is to protect New Zealand’s special places and unique biodiversity for New Zealanders now and in the future. Understanding the full range of values that conservation delivers, both intrinsic and extrinsic, helps to highlight the interrelationship between preservation and prosperity. At the heart of this is our understanding that the most fundamental benefit that nature delivers is life-sustaining ecosystem services. A recent World Bank report summed this up aptly:
Biodiversity is the foundation and mainstay of agriculture, forests, and fisheries. Biological resources provide the raw materials for livelihoods, agriculture, medicines, trade, tourism, and industry. Forests, grasslands, freshwater, and marine and other natural ecosystems provide a range of services, often not recognised in national economic accounts but vital to human welfare: regulating water flows and water quality, flood control, pollination, decontamination, carbon sequestration, soil conservation, and nutrient and hydrological cycling.1
Clean and green is not simply a brand. It is a statement that ultimately the consequences of failing to live in balance with nature lie with us, not nature. Nature’s ability to recover from imbalance is well demonstrated; ours is not. Managing for healthy biodiversity leads to healthy ecosystems, and healthy ecosystems provide the life-giving services that we depend on for our very existence and for our prosperity. That is the underlying logic for protecting a significant area of New Zealand’s land and waters in their natural state, and the rationale that makes conservation an investment providing a good return for New Zealanders.
Alastair Morrison
Director-General
30 September 2009
Footnote
1 The World Bank, Environment Department 2009: Convenient solutions to an inconvenient
truth: ecosystem-based approaches to climate change. Report No. 49313. Washington,
DC, USA. 91 p. http://go.worldbank.org/CJOR8I0EQ0
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