Online exclusive
Inform your opinion is a fortnightly feature in which someone with an informed opinion shares their thoughts about an issue, gives the background to it and explains why it matters.
Inform your opinion: You didn’t see the French government debating the cost of saving Notre-Dame cathedral, a national treasure, when it was gutted by fire. Notre-Dame will be restored, whatever the cost.
Yet last week, the Minister of Conservation, Tama Potaka, suggested that some of our endangered taonga, our unique flora and fauna, are too expensive to save. Understandably, this announcement caused outrage among those who care for our biodiversity.
Why is Aotearoa New Zealand’s unique biodiversity worth saving, and is the minister right?
Here we provide a scientific perspective on the importance of saving our flora and fauna.
Our unique biodiversity has famously been described by US scientist and historian Jared Diamond as “the nearest approach to life on another planet”. Equally quotable, biogeographer Gareth Nelson stated, “explain New Zealand and the rest of the world falls into place around it”. In other words, our national treasures are globally important.
From popoto (Māui’s dolphin) to kākāpō, pepeketua (frogs) to ngāokeoke (peripatus; velvet worms), our biodiversity is unique and, in some cases, ancient. The tūpuna (ancestors) of Aotearoa’s living and extinct wrens have been isolated here for 70 million years.
Yet for all our unique biodiversity, Aotearoa is one of the extinction capitals of the world. Successive waves of human arrival have resulted in the loss of 35% of our birds, from the mighty moa to the majestic huia. The freshwater fish, upokororo (grayling), was ironically only protected after its extinction.
The Minister of Conservation’s dangerous lack of ambition to save species could arguably instigate the latest extinction pulse in this country and significantly contribute to the world’s ongoing sixth mass extinction event.
Aotearoa’s biodiversity underpins our tourism sector and economy. People come from all around the world to see our animals. Do not underestimate the pulling power of a kiwi or a hoiho (yellow-eyed penguin).
Yet, our plants and animals provide much more, such as pollination of plants and seed dispersal, termed “ecosystem services”. By deciding a species is not worth saving, you are not only condemning it to extinction, but all the ecological connections it’s involved in.
Where other species are dependent on this species, they, too, may be lost (known as co-extinctions). The wood rose is Aotearoa’s only indigenous parasitic flowering plant. If our unique pekapeka (bats) were a casualty of conservation cost-cutting, then the wood rose would surely follow suit. Pekapeka are the only remaining pollinator of the wood rose, after the loss of kākāpō from much of the motu.
The conservation minister’s position is that we should be “practical” and decide which species to save and which to not. To instead save all species would “take [a] superhuman effort” that he “wouldn’t want to imagine the cost” of.
However, he doesn’t need to imagine the cost; he rather needs to talk to the department that he leads. For more than a decade, the Department of Conservation has had a system in place for documenting the management needs of species and ecosystems and their associated costs, and prioritising these needs for maximum benefit.
Of course, the information isn’t perfect, and neglecting investment in science continues to erode Aotearoa’s ability to contribute to knowledge fundamental to making informed decisions.
Knowledge of species’ distributions, threats to species and how best to mitigate these threats is critical in a fast-changing world. Further understanding of taxonomic distinctiveness (how unique species are), taxonomic representation and levels of genetic diversity contribute to decisions about which species to prioritise in management.
Forcing the department to meet a 7% savings target, resulting in a squeeze on operating budget and the loss of more than 100 jobs, is not how you value biodiversity or generate the robust scientific evidence on which effective conservation depends.
Adopting the equivalent of the Australian Biological Resources Study would provide a model for supporting fundamental research needed for improving evidence-based conservation.
It would also help meet the goals of the 2018-2027 plan for taxonomy in Australasia, released by the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Australian Academy of Science. The study provides large sums of contestable funding for national leadership and to support the discovery and taxonomy of biodiversity to “underpin knowledge and decision-making across government, science and industry”. Strong investment in conservation and research will not only help save biodiversity, but will also help the economy recover from Covid and recession.
Once our species are gone, they are gone forever. Aotearoa’s native species and ecosystems are not a “nice to have”, but essential to the place we call home.
If the Minister of Conservation is not in Parliament as an ambitious advocate for conservation and the fundamental ecological and taxonomic research to support it, who is?
Associate Professor Nic Rawlence is a palaeoecologist who reconstructs prehistoric ecosystems, how they have been impacted by humans and climate change, and how this information can be used for evidence-based conservation management of Aotearoa’s biodiversity. Dr Jo Monks is a conservation biologist working on a range of applied ecological issues. Her background is in herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians) and behavioural ecology, but she now works on a range of different species including bats, birds and invertebrates.
