Beauty threatened by tempting prices

By RAEWYN PEART*

New Zealand's outstanding landscapes attract a lot of people.

They may be international or domestic visitors who enjoy them only briefly, owners of holiday homes who seek a coastal or rural retreat, retirees, or permanent lifestyle residents who choose to live on the fringes of urban areas and physically or electronically commute.

Some of our landscapes are protected by public ownership. There is always pressure to buy more of them when they are placed on the market. But most are in private hands. In that market, the strong demand for a piece of paradise is fuelling property prices like never before.

Small beachfront baches on the Coromandel Peninsula are changing hands for more than $1 million. Vacant lifestyle blocks in the Wakatipu Basin are being sold for similar sums.

High prices provide a strong incentive for rural landowners to subdivide and sell their land. In some areas, subdivision provides an alternative economic use for land that, in an increasingly open economy, has become more and more marginal for farming or horticulture. It also provides a retirement income for ageing landowners.

Somewhat surprisingly, given their importance to the country and the extraordinary pressures for their development, New Zealand has no special provisions to ensure the protection of outstanding landscapes on privately owned land.

Their management is overseen by the Resource Management Act which applies to all privately owned land, whether outstanding or not. That system is weighted towards development rather than protection. While most OECD countries have special measures to protect their outstanding landscapes, we do not.

Past planning efforts, under the former Town and Country Planning Act, focused on maintaining the productivity of rural land through restricting its subdivision. This helped to maintain the naturalness of the coastal landscape. Ironically, perhaps, the Ministry of Works and Development operated as an effective coastal conservation advocate, and plans that protected the coast and productive land were more difficult to circumvent.

The 1991 Resource Management Act prompted a shift, from preventing coastal subdivision to facilitating it, while mitigating the harmful effects of subdivision and consequent development. Instead of stopping the landowner subdividing, the act focuses more on reducing the impact of each individual development, through better design.

Resource consents may include conditions requiring such things as the covenanting of bush areas, revegetation of degraded pasture, location of buildings off the skyline and the use of non-reflective colours.

This is "eco-efficient" in that we are getting more development for the same impacts. Cumulatively, however, as more and more development occurs, the ultimate impact is the same - a predominantly natural area becoming dominated by built structures.

The Resource Management Act fails to adequately address this cumulative impact on the landscape. Applications for development, which are not provided for in the district plan, are frequent and are dealt with ad hoc.

Councils find it difficult to turn down such applications if all site-specific issues have been addressed.

Information may not be available on the broader strategic implications of the proposal and what other development has been approved in the area.

It is difficult to determine when the carrying capacity of an area has been reached, though easier to tell when it has been exceeded - which is too late.

One way in which these non-complying applications for development can get consent is through trading off harmful landscape impacts against potential positive ecological benefits.

Development of significant landscape areas is approved in exchange for protecting existing areas of bush or commitments to plant more indigenous vegetation. This is a major issue on the coast where much privately owned land has historically been cleared of forest and put into pastoral use.

While potentially obtaining ecological benefits (although this is often arguable), this still results in the built environment intruding on natural landscapes.

Councils struggle to identify outstanding landscapes, let alone protect them. This is the result of the subjective element of landscape assessment as well as the amount of money at stake. The issue of protection is often highly politicised and leads to large swings at local government level.

There are few checks and balances on council decision-making. The Ministry for the Environment, the Department of Conservation and regional councils are generally not active in protecting landscape values. Consents, which should not have been approved, slip through. Weak plans survive the system. This is particularly the case where the community is divided and there is little environmental activism.

There is no long-term certainty in the Resource Management Act system. District plan provisions can be amended at any time through plan changes.

Applications that do not comply with plan provisions can be approved. As land prices continue to rise there are increasing incentives for landowners to try to get consent for more intensive developments. Long-term protection is extremely difficult under this system.

So how might we weight the system towards protection of our outstanding landscapes rather than development?

First, we need to identify the areas of landscape that are important and define why they are important. Secondly, we need to reverse the presumption that development is appropriate to a presumption that development is not appropriate in these special areas.

Thirdly, we need to entrench sound planning provisions for these areas for the long term. Then we need good oversight of local decision-making.

There has been much criticism of the resource management process and its cost to business. But the act is not delivering for the environment, either. It needs reform before all of our special places are subdivided and built upon.

We are in real danger of losing our outstanding landscapes and with them part of our sense of identity as a people.

* Raewyn Peart is a senior policy analyst for the Environmental Defence Society. She is presenting a paper at the Reclaiming Our Heritage: the New Zealand Landscape conference in Auckland on July 25-26.