Forest & Bird Backs Call for Biodiversity Action

Forest & Bird today congratulated World Wildlife Fund for its “Beyond Rio” report, which highlights New Zealand’s declining environmental effort since the original Rio Summit in 1992.

“It is high time that New Zealanders drew a line in the sand on the continued degradation of our environment, not only for the necessary protection of our unique wildlife and wild places, but for our economy’s sake,” said Forest & Bird Conservation Advocate Nicola Toki.

“We sell our products and services to the world on an implied agreement that we are ’100 per cent pure’, and if we can’t live up to that then our financial wellbeing will suffer.”

The Rio+20 summit next month is predicted to be the most significant international meeting of the year, and because of New Zealand’s perceived ”clean green” brand the world will be watching us closely, said Toki.

“It is galling to see in last week’s Budget that just $156 million will be spent on natural heritage -down 6 million - for the protection of our wildlife and wild places across the whole country, when the government is looking at spending $120 million on public relations about the sale of state-owned assets.

“At no time has it been more crucial for our government to focus on the protection of our environment than now, when our biodiversity is in peril and when our inaction will be viewed on a world stage.”

Forest & Bird believes that New Zealand’s economic prosperity relies on our international brand, which is based on our clean and green reputation. 

The WWF report showed that none of the major commitments that New Zealand signed up to in 1992 have been achieved. In fact, since then our freshwater quality has rapidly declined, with 43% of all lakes and most of New Zealand lowland rivers too polluted to even swim in.  Over 3000 species of native wildlife are now threatened, with only 200 having any kind of management for protection.

Background:

-          New Zealand is known worldwide as a “biodiversity hotspot”, along with Madagascar, Indo-Burma and the Himalayas.

-          A 2010 study showed New Zealand had the highest proportion of threatened species out of 179 countries.

-          In a recent global study, New Zealand ranked 18th worst out of 189 countries for environmental performance (China was 17th) (Bradshaw CJA, Giam X, Sodhi NS (2010) Evaluating the Relative Environmental Impact of Countries. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10440. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010440v). 

-          It is impacting on our exports.  E.g. In April 2010, Trader Joes, a USA chain with over 300 supermarkets, confirmed it had discontinued sales of orange roughy “based on customer feedback and in support of work to source sustainable seafood”. In 2009 Waitrose, the UK supermarket chain used by the royal family, announced it no longer stocked New Zealand-caught hoki as it failed to meet the store's sustainability policy, prompting headlines reading "No hoki for Queen".

-          Our budget for protecting natural heritage (2012 Budget) is $156 million. 

-          The New Zealand sea lion is headed for extinction (due to squid fishery bycatch) in 23 years.

-          There are now 55 adult Maui’s dolphins remaining.

-          The “Yale report”, widely quoted by Ministers and the Prime Minister, which claims NZ has the second best water quality in the world, has been debunked many times as being inaccurate. http://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2011/05/10/professor-hamilton-on-freshwater-management-concerns/

ENDS

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