The Department of Conservation consulted on the proposed National Conservation Policy Statement (NCPS), which is intended to provide new national direction for conservation in Aotearoa under the Conservation Amendment Bill.
The Nature & Climate Group submission (here) sought to have a strong NCPS focus on CONSERVATION rather than the consultation document’s focus on enabling economic development.
This includes the need for the NCPS to recognise the conservation principles in the 2022 Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which Aotearoa New Zealand is signatory to. These include protection of areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, through ecologically representative, well-connected and effectively governed protected-area systems.
The NCPS further needs to recognise the value of public conservation land for carbon storage and sequestration and for other ecosystem services. For example, recent research has found a carbon sink in Aotearoa’s terrestrial biosphere (concentrated in the South Island) of ~171 million tonnes of CO2 per year, which is more than five times Aotearoa’s gross CO2 emissions in 2024 (31.5 million tonnes). When achieving the Paris Agreement’s CO2 emission reduction goals relies heavily on enhancing carbon storage and sequestration globally, protecting this degree of nature-based solutions must be a crucial part of our conservation management.