By Chris Howe

Like Christmas, Eid ul-Fitr and your mum’s birthday, New Zealand’s annual Conservation Week has come around once again. But while your mum would be pleasantly surprised if you gave her a birthday present every day, and your kids would definitely appreciate it if Santa visited more often, we shouldn’t have to wait for Conservation Week to do something special for New Zealand’s precious wildlife.

The theme of Conservation Week this year is “Show New Zealand how much you love it” and, very much in the vein of previous years, it takes the form of a raft of feel-good stories, a nicely designed website and thousands of get-your-gumboots-on-and-get-your-hands-dirty type events all around the country.

Now there’s nothing wrong at all about getting involved in conservation work – in fact quite the opposite. A great deal of New Zealand’s precious and much-loved wildlife depends on communities taking action in their own backyards. WWF has proudly supported more than 400 local community groups all around the country over the last 10 years to do just that.

It’s just that after nine years working for WWF-New Zealand, it is quite clear to me that New Zealand’s wildlife is in deep trouble, and while positive good news stories have their part to play, we also need to hear about the problems and the issues, and what needs to be done about them. Facing up to – and suggesting answers for – the hard questions is something we rarely see from the New Zealand Government. If I never see another photo of the Conservation Minister, of whatever political colour, holding a kiwi chick, planting a tree or otherwise celebrating a conservation “success”, I’ll be happy, because the true story is much less palatable.

Let’s take a few examples: Firstly, the kiwi. It’s generally accepted that there are five species of kiwi, although for conservation management purposes these are treated as eleven different types or, to use the correct scientific terminology, “taxa”. Between 1998 and 2008 (the second decade of the Department of Conservation) the total number of kiwi declined from 100,000 to 70,000. Today, at least seven taxa are still declining in numbers. Of the four that are not, two are classified as nationally critical. What’s worse, and is an indictment of the government’s priorities for investing in critical conservation issues, kiwi outside protected areas are not only declining, they are actually predicted to decline further because management is restricted to small pockets of dedicated community action.

Or what about Hector’s dolphin? Down from 30,000 in 1970 to around 7,000 today, the simplest and most direct way to halt their decline is to ban fishing with nets in the near shore coastal habitat where they live. That’s not banning fishing altogether, just fishing with set nets and trawl nets, both types of fishing quite inappropriate for the near shore environment in any case. Despite the clear need for such measures, and WWF together with a number of other conservation organisations and scientists pointing this out to the government in 2004 the response has been weak given the scale of the problem. The government proposed a number of measures in 2008, which were hardly adequate to prevent further decline in the population, but after a court challenge by the fishing industry, only some of those were implemented. Today, six years on from WWF’s original challenge, the government is only consulting again on those that were contested.

And thirdly, there’s New Zealand’s pitiful response to conserving our huge, spectacular and diverse marine environment. It is generally accepted that a robust network of marine protected areas covering at least 10% of the oceans is one essential part of conserving marine wildlife and ecosystems (although there are other measures needed as well, such as sustainable fisheries management and control of pollution from the land, to name just two.) In fact, New Zealand’s commitments as a party to the world’s most important global treaty on conservation, the Convention on Biological Diversity, oblige us to set aside at least 10%. Some scientists say it should be nearer 30%. But in New Zealand, the area fully protected from all threats is about 0.3%. Yes, that decimal point is in the right place. Not only do we not have a timetable for deciding where and when to establish marine protection, we don’t even have the ability to establish fully protected marine reserves outside the 12 nautical mile coastal zone. A new marine reserves bill has been languishing in Parliament since 2001, and it is unclear when, if ever, it will re-emerge. WWF last year published Future Seas which shows unequivocally that New Zealand needs more fully protected areas in our marine environment to ensure future prosperity, and this is backed up by research on the views of New Zealanders in carried out by Colmar Brunton for WWF in 2005 assets.

In this International Year of Biodiversity, eighteen years after the Convention on Biological Diversity was signed in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the executive secretary of the Convention confirmed that biodiversity in general and marine biodiversity specifically continue to decline, and that urgent action was needed.

I think it’s safe to say that most, if not all, people who live in New Zealand, love it here. We can also be sure that many people who don’t live in New Zealand love it here as well. It is certainly very important that as individuals we “show New Zealand we love it” in Conservation Week.

But it’s also vitally important that this government shows that it loves New Zealand wildlife as well. Getting the marine protected areas process moving again, investing in kiwi conservation inside and outside protected areas, and making sure Hector’s and Maui’s dolphins are safe from all fishing nets won’t solve all of New Zealand’s wildlife conservation problems, but it would be a very good start.

For our dolphins, kiwi and thousands of other treasured New Zealand species, every week is most certainly not conservation week, but if we really want to “show New Zealand we love it”, it really should be.