Weaving climate and ecological resilience into our whenua

“Cyclone Gabrielle hit and wreaked havoc on our Tairāwhiti river systems, sheep and beef farms, the whole taiao has been hit hard…we really need to take a good look at what the future of the region looks like.”

“Everyone actually knows what we each need to be doing to reduce our footprint…we just need to get on and do it.”

“The answer to our social issues, climate issues, environmental issues which are all just one big issue really, is the integration of us and nature.”

“We are in a position of great risk, the time for action to minimise risk is now, a decade from now what we do won’t be as impactful.”

“If the government figures out how to make native forests profitable in the eyes of the economy and the market, then I think people will put the same care and time into them as a farmer does with a dairy farm.”

“We have biodiversity loss & climate crises at a planetary level & only in the last generation or two started to wrap our heads around the scale and we’ve never tackled a problem that big. We are going to need collaboration to match that problem scale which has never been done by humanity. “

“Yes we need to deal with gross emissions but we also just need a lot more trees, and preferably a lot more natives.”

“There are thousands of farmers across the country carrying out restorative environmental projects and we need landowners to be incentivized and recognized for the incredible work that’s being done across our catchments.”

“Try to work with nature as much as possible and use all the other techniques of fencing, pest animal control, weed control and planting to supplement what nature can do. That is particularly required at large scale because if we’re looking for tens of thousands of hectares of marginal land to go into native forestry, we’re not going to be doing it by planting alone.”

“If we are to be levied on a stock unit we need to be rewarded for a tree, we need to be treating both sides of the ledger equally.”

“A good future looks like a diversified landscape and we can take action to ensure nature can heal itself. We think natural regeneration will be much more effective at landscape scales and we don’t have to pay for every tree coming up in that process.”

“We need to be pursuing emissions reductions as fast and far as possible and we need to be taking as much carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into native forests as we can – the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal states we should be trying to restore 30% of every habitat by 2030.”

“Native forests of mixed ages, mixed species and often indigenous in their location and specificities, those are the forests that will provide offsets for the hard to abate emissions, to keep us at net zero for the second half of this century.”

“My land connects me to my family, which connects me to the community which ultimately allows us to connect to the country as a whole and I think that’s really important.”

“The bush is the one place I feel like me, the bush has looked after me since I was a little kid…I love the bush, for me, it is my place of wellbeing.”