Promoting conservation with development
By
OLIVER RIDDELL
Careful development of New Zealand's natural resources can lead to economic growth, improved living standards, employment opportunities, and increased well-being for all. Depletion, destruction and over-exploitation of those resources can undermine the means by which New Zealanders can survive and flourish. Sustainable development will be achieved only when, conservation is fully integrated into development and the two are no longer opposed. These suppositions are argued in the New Zealand Conservation Strategy, published by the Nature Conservation Council today. The study was prepared following the publication of the World Conservation Strategy in March. 1980. It will be presented to the General Assembly of the I.U.C.N. (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) when it meets in Christchurch in October.
Called “Integrating Conservation and Development," the strategy is a 64-page booklet. It is intended to be read by developers and to this end has taken more account of the interests, of developers than many conservationists will like.
The booklet is to be given a wide circulation before the I.U.C.N. meeting, and comments on it will be sought. There is a very real chance that it will be ignored by developers, including the Government, once the fanfare of its launching is over.
The booklet deserves a better fate. The strategy attempts to explain the integration of conservation and development, and examines ways in which this may be promoted by those concerned about the country’s future.
In particular, it seeks to influence Government policymakers and their advisers; managers of natural resources, farmers, foresters and fisherspecies at risk of extinction.
men; people actively interested in conservation issues; those engaged in planning and programming development, including Government agencies, industry and commerce, and trade unions.
The strategy has five main objects:
1. To protect ecological processes and life support systems (such as freshwater and coastal systems, soil, forest, scrub, and grassland) on which human survival and development depend.
2. To provide for cultural, spiritual and other nonmaterial needs of society by the protection of natural resources and the development of diversity in their use. 3. To preserve genetic diversity (the range of genetic material found in organisms) on which depends the functioning of many life-support systems with commercial, medical and scientific uses. 4. To ensure the sustainable use of the renewable resources (especially fish, forests, pasture and arable lands) on which the New Zealand economy is largely based.
5. To ensure that non-renew-able resources are depleted at a rate that enables transition to the use of more abundant materials or of sustainable resources.
The booklet argues that all these aims are a matter of urgency because the resource base of some important industries is shrinking, as well as sometimes being poorly managed. More than three-quarters of New Zealand soils show signs of erosion. More than 30 of the 300 estuary systems which support fisheries are moderately or grossly polluted. Some living resources are being over-exploited. Rock lobsters, Tasman Bay scallops. Bay of Plenty trevally, Canterbury Bight elephant fish, and Hauraki Gulf snapper are all endangered. There are 531 threatened and endangered
Less than 10 per cent of the original freshwater wetlands in New Zealand are still unmodified.
The booklet argues that opportunities for spiritual and cultural development are being lost. Accessible open spaces and wild areas near cities and towns are scarce; only remnants of the once widespread lowland native forests remain; natural and wild areas are being lost to hydro and gebthe -mal development.
Failure to conserve resources incurs a high cost, according to this study. Costs of imported oil continue to rise and a continued supply of imported minerals cannot be guaranteed at an acceptable price. The main obstacles to achieving conservation are said to be: The belief that resource conservation is limited, rather than a process that cuts across all sectors; the consequent failure to integrate conservation with development; the lack of a capacity to conserve; the failure to recognise the need to plan now for a sustainable yield. What is called "the lack of a capacity to conserve" is described in the booklet as a result of inadequacies in some legislation and the lack of enforcement, poor organisation (notably a lack of co-ordination between Government agencies), and a basic lack of information on priorities, on the productive and regenerative capacities of living resources, and on the trade-offs between one management option and another?. The study determines the priority requirements for achieving each objective, and then proposes major legislative changes to assist this.
The booklet is not a document of doom and gloom. Nor does it give any grounds for complacency. It is intended as a document for study, and , carries no Government promises as to its impact or acceptance as a basis for Government action.
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