New Zealand has a record 2788 threatened species
Tue 17 Aug 2010: New Zealand has a record 2788 threatened speciesBy MIKE JOY - The Dominion Post "Government failures and ecological apathy bite back"
OPINION: New Zealand has achieved yet another world record, but unsurprisingly this one wasn't trumpeted like our sport achievements. The shameful news is that New Zealand is now right up there (or down there) with world leaders in biodiversity loss. Massey scientist Mark Seabrook-Davison recently pointed out that New Zealand has a record 2788 threatened species (and another 3000 without enough data to classify but most of these would join the list if the data were available), making us world leaders in biodiversity decline.
Ironically, 2010 is the United Nations Year of Biodiversity, and so the breaking of this news should have been a scandalous front-page headline to provoke us into action, but instead it barely rated a mention. The lack of coverage by the media and the lack of public outrage at these glaring signals of ecological collapse in New Zealand reveals the power of economists to influence politicians, news media and therefore, public opinion.
It is not just a sad indictment of the failure of the government organisations charged with protecting New Zealand's biodiversity but also an indication of the power of the business lobby to let short- term economic gain take precedence over long-term sustainability.
While we have been fixated on the economy, our "100% pure", "clean green" image has been slipping further away. Not surprisingly when it comes to our freshwater biodiversity we are right up there among the world's worst with two-thirds of our freshwater fish species, our only freshwater crayfish and freshwater mussel all on the threatened list.
Worse still, my research shows that if we keep polluting at the rate we are now, almost all of our native fish will be extinct by 2050 or earlier. How did we end up with this biodiversity crisis after 20 years of the much vaunted Resource Management Act? After all, this aspirational piece of legislation was put in place to protect biodiversity, the biodiversity that underpins the functioning of ecosystems - the very ecosystems that underpin our ecological and economic wellbeing. The trouble with legislation like the RMA is that there is always an economic incentive (akin to tax law), to find ways to circumvent or minimise the effect the law has on profits.
Simply put, it is expensive to limit environmental damage. So predictably the economic incentive for the evasion of the laws that are there for a public good, quickly became a big money-spinner for lawyers and consulting firms. These law firms and environmental consultancies have been successful at helping their clients evade the RMA. They have increased profits for developers/polluters while undermining the ecosystems that sustain us all; effectively allowing private profit from public loss.
THE economic advantage is always with the "destroyer" and not with the protector. When we place no value on what ecosystems do for us, then there is always money to be gained, at least in the short-term from depleting them.
And obviously when it comes to protecting the functioning of ecosystems for future generations, there is rarely money to be made (except maybe for ecotourism).
For example, under the present regime, for hydro-electric companies every drop of water not going through the turbines can be measured in dollars lost, conversely every drop left for river ecosystems has zero or minimal economic value (but note, huge value in terms of ecosystem services to all of society).
So they can afford to pay lawyers and consultants forever to appeal and drag out the process within the confines of the judicial system until they get their way or until any opposition folds (and remember the money to fund this process eventually comes from all of us whether through, power bills or taxes).
Another contributing factor is that for the past 20 years central government disregarded its own requirement to come up with a National Policy Statement on fresh waters. This failure meant that individual regional councils were left to their own resources to come up with their own defensible environmental policies. However, because of the immense disparity between regional incomes, the relatively economically well-off councils in highly populated regions ended up with far stronger regulations (as well as the crucial monitoring capability) than the less populated regions.
This meant for example, that an activity that would never be permitted in Auckland, like wetland drainage, is an everyday occurrence on the West Coast. Worse, this lack of a National Policy Statement played right into the hands of national polluter groups like Federated Farmers and Fonterra by allowing them to bully and pick off regional councils one by one as each council individually proposed policies intended to protect ecosystems.
Yet another factor is the failure of government departments involved with biodiversity protection. A glaring example is the demise of our endemic longfin eel.
The longfin is listed as a threatened species by the Conservation Department but inexplicably at the same time it is "managed" as a commercial fish species by the Fisheries Ministry. Under this so-called management by Fisheries, longfin eels are showing all the classic signs of collapse: a decline in distribution, average size, biomass and recruitment as well as grossly altered sex ratios.
A further clear sign of fishery collapse is that Fisheries can't drop its quota limits fast enough for fishermen to be restricted by them (the fishery is declining so fast that fishermen can't catch enough to reach their quotas so the quotas have had no effect). In an even more ludicrous turn of events, DOC has recently given consents for commercial eel fishermen to harvest longfins in the conservation estate. This was driven by fishermen needing to find new places to fish because of declines in catch rates as they have progressively fished out the rest of the country. As outrageous as that sounds, DOC receives money in the form of a concession payment from commercial fishermen to harvest a threatened endemic species in the conservation estate.
These are just a few of many examples of the bureaucratic bumbling by government departments apparently driven by economic rather than ecological goals. All these government failures and the gradual neutralising of the RMA, accompanied by the unabated rush towards maximising agricultural production with no concern for ecological or even economic sustainability, is finally beginning to bite back.
Rapidly now the "100% pure", "clean green" deception is being exposed both here and overseas. That will have negative impacts right through the economy from tourism to farming.
In most cases however, the lag time for seeing the ecological effects is far longer than for the economic effects. If we continue with the status quo, the ability of ecosystems to function will continue to be reduced as biodiversity decreases. This loss of function combined with more direct impacts like soil compaction from overstocking and cadmium contamination from excessive fertiliser use is increasingly limiting agricultural production. Now the folly of this mad rush for economic growth is becoming obvious to everyone, not just to ecologists.
If anyone doubts the significance of the relationship between nature (biodiversity) and our existence, we can just look to the fate of past civilisations for evidence.
Many ended after the ecosystems they depended on crashed through misuse and ignorance. No doubt, the reality of their dependence on nature came back to the inhabitants of those civilisations vividly through the stark reality of starvation (or another similar ecological catastrophe).
Those civilisations, like ours, had become obsessed with economics and in doing so they destroyed the ecosystems they depended on. It wasn't an economic crash that destroyed past civilisations but the reality of ecosystem collapse.
Think of a simple example, Easter Island, when the last tree was cut down it was just a matter of time to the end of that civilisation. No doubt if there were economists on Easter Island, they would have been telling the islanders that if they didn't continue cutting the trees the economy would collapse.
Mike Joy is a senior lecturer in ecology / environmental science at Massey University.
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