Vast national restoration project must start locally

Catchment groups have been incredibly successful in Aotearoa at implementing landscape-scale environmental management on private land by coordinating integrated action across multiple landowners.

Projects undertaken have been diverse and include enhancing freshwater systems, introducing new farm production systems, native biodiversity conservation, plant and animal pest management, and exploring new income opportunities. Catchment groups also play a key role in rural extension by bringing experts in to talk to farmers and others in the area.

Recloaking Papatūānuku is an ambitious national-scale initiative to restore 2 million hectares of native forest and wetlands within the next 15-30 years, and will require collaboration with and leadership of catchment groups.

The aim of Recloaking Papatūānuku is to increase landscape resilience against increasingly severe storm events, help conserve our unique native biodiversity and permanently sequester atmospheric CO2. The initiative will directly tackle the effects of climate change and address the biodiversity crisis here in Aotearoa.

Recloaking Papatūānuku will primarily take place across private land that is used for farming, horticulture, plantation forests and as lifestyle blocks. This land has a range of ownerships including individual Māori and pākeha, Māori land trusts and other entities, and companies, but is usually not owned by the government. While public land will be involved, Recloaking Papatūānuku will by necessity be implemented largely on private land.

For Recloaking Papatūānuku to be successful, it needs to be driven from the bottom up, a “forest-roots” initiative, led by the people on the ground, with support from local, regional and central government.

Catchment group site visit. Photo: David Norton.

Catchment groups will play an essential role, because these groups know the current land uses and are aware of which  parts of catchments critically require restoration to reduce flood water flows and sediment loss.

Catchment groups are also best placed to undertake and coordinate the mahi that is required to implement restoration such as facilitating the ongoing management of restoration sites and the threats these sites face, from, for example, feral animals, weeds and fire.

Recloaking Papatūānuku is not a “one-size-fits-all approach” – rather the initiative as a programme would always be adapted to the local context, which again catchment groups are best placed to do.

Also, local people are the ones most directly impacted by extreme weather events such as Cyclone Gabrielle, so they have a direct incentive to do this work. The improved landscape resilience and biodiversity that will result from implementing Recloaking Papatūānuku will directly benefit local farmers, iwi, and communities – and catchment groups are fundamental for making sure that these outcomes are achieved.

There is a need for higher-level support of implementation from government agencies, tertiary institutions,Crown Research Institutes, and others. Support will be required for catchment mapping and prioritisation of sites for management, work programme development, ecological advice on planting sites and species choice, threat management, auditing of management inputs and biodiversity outcomes, and so on. Help will come from multiple sources and will need to be coordinated.

Provision of full-time coordinators for catchment groups will  be essential both to ensure that appropriate support is fed through to catchment  groups and to ensure that work programmes are efficiently managed.

Relying on voluntary catchment coordinators, who are often farmers, is unrealistic for a programme of this scale. The recently formed Aotearoa New Zealand Catchment Community presents a real opportunity to coordinate the high-level support required for catchment groups across the motu.

Recloaking Paptūanuku is “he kakano e kore e tatari kia ruia – a seed that can’t wait to be sown,” an apt phrase that came to us in a hui with Waihoroi Shortland, Te Tai Tokerau, Ngāti Hine.

But those seeds need to be planted by the local people, not by the government, and catchment groups are in a unique position to do this. Recloaking Papatūānuku represents a key opportunity to both secure the long-term viability of catchment groups, while at the same time allowing them to make a massive contribution through weaving ecological resilience back into our landscapes that benefits all of us here in Aotearoa.

David Norton is an emeritus professor at the University of Canterbury and strategic science adviser to Pure Advantage. This piece was originally published in Farmer’s Weekly.