Protecting our public conservation estate

New Zealand’s public conservation lands are amongst our greatest national assets. They protect irreplaceable indigenous biodiversity, provide clean water and carbon storage, support recreation and tourism, strengthen our resilience to climate change, and hold deep cultural significance for Māori.  

Opportunity supports making our conservation system more efficient, coherent and fit-for-purpose. The current concessions system can be slow and unnecessarily complex, and conservation management planning can be more flexible. We support sensible streamlining where it improves the ability of the Department of Conservation to deliver its work, but it must not come at the cost of weakening environmental protection.

The Conservation Amendment Bill goes further than administrative reform. In our submission, we argue that it risks changing the fundamental direction of conservation policy by giving greater weight to development while weakening some of the safeguards around our public conservation lands and waters.

Opportunity would not support the Bill without significant changes being made to it.

Note: Our submission is based on the Government’s announcement that provisions relating to the exchange or disposal of public conservation land will be removed from the Bill, so it does not comment on those provisions.

Opportunity is calling for:

• Conservation to remain the primary purpose of the Department of Conservation, rather than requiring economic development to be enabled “to the greatest extent practicable”.
  

• Nature to be properly valued by requiring natural capital - including ecological, recreational and cultural values - to be assessed alongside economic benefits for significant development proposals.
  

• Strong checks and balances by retaining meaningful roles for the New Zealand Conservation Authority and Conservation Boards, alongside genuine public participation in significant decisions.
  

• Te Tiriti obligations to be strengthened, not narrowed, with early, meaningful and properly resourced engagement with iwi and hapū.
  

• Sensible regulatory streamlining to stay, provided robust environmental safeguards remain in place.

The goal should be a conservation system that is better and more agile - one that ensures the restoration of indigenous biodiversity and preservation of ecological integrity remain paramount, and enables the Department of Conservation to manage public conservation lands and waters both effectively and efficiently.