Biodiversity Protection as a national policy

Thank you! Biodiversity IS the future of our country.

In order to reach the governments target of a Predator Free 2050 conservation will require a much higher level of investment; not simply to scale up predator control operations, but more importantly to understand the social barriers and values which will ultimately determine whether this initative succeeds.

I totally believe our unique biodiversity is part of what defines us as New Zealanders and underpins our economy. A national understanding of the risks of biodiversity loss and leadership of evidence based national programme of restoration would position New Zealand on the global stage, promote sustainable economic growth through tourism and provide an intimate understanding of the natural ecosystem for our future generations.

Recognising that our wealth ultimately comes from primary industries and that involves use of natural resources (water, soil, sunshine, minerals, seas, etc) exploitation has to be sustainable as far as possible with as little secondary impact as possible. Pastoral farming has generally removed or modified all biodiversity from sites it now occupies, but there is a lot of marginal land which could be reverted. This would be a triple win – carbon sinks, soil stabilisation and water filtering, and possibly honey production. Perhaps some incentives to retire marginal land are required.
I note a comment below states “in the last 40 years…fish stocks are all diminished”; fact is, since introduction of the Quota Management System some 30 years ago fish stocks have increased.

Our natural environment is the source of our health and our wealth, and without its wellbeing we too will become victims in the next mass extinction.

I believe it’s the right idea just not sure of the implementation. It we improve our environment we become a much more desirable place to visit which is great for tourism, not to mention the morale benefit to the local NZ community. I also think the NZ citizenship only land ownership model has to be done at the same time. I don’t see a down side to policies to improve the environment. Cost to individual must be consider but can’t be a reason not to implement.

Biodiversity is essential. GMO herbicide resistant crops lead to over use of herbicides and loss of weeds , trees flowers. Nature cant actually do without all those plants we consider weeds, insects we think are pests.. Reducing the number of species and clobbering the environment is removing the resilience of the ecosystem, and it will kill us all eventually, if we dont leave green viodiverse space and strips and national parks throughout the country

Theo’s link makes interesting reading and I like the thinking. I would like to see firmer policy on baselines. I would add that we actually already have some pretty good legislation governing statutory obligations for government agencies and the private sector but sadly they are extremely poorly implemented with little apparent accountability from certain govt departments.

Its hard to live without consuming some aspect of our environment and this is why we have the Sixth Great Extinction, climate change and water issues. The environment is a public good but we put no price on its consumption. People take and destroy enormously valuable aspects of the environment in order to gain a comparatively small private benefit without recompense to the public good. That is the story of agricultural intensification and many other types of development.

So what is to be done? My preference is to tax environmental consumption as part of a wider strategy aimed at (1) broadening the tax base, (2) making it fairer, (3) reducing taxes on things we want to encourage (like employment,enterprise and buying the goods services that make our economy go) and (4) taxing things we don’t want (like unhealthy food, environmental impacts and other things that erode people’s wellbeing).

I think we need an environmental consumption tax alongside a Comprehensive Capital Income Tax (and other taxes on harming the public good for private profit – like sugar & fat taxes). For pragmatic practical reasons, I’d confine the environmental tax to land-based (including freshwater) environmental consumption and I’d levy the tax on the basis of land use intensity estimated from satellite imagery. All landowners would be liable for the tax with rebates for land managed in ways that provides public benefits – biodiversity conservation, landscape & catchment protection, carbon sink.

For much more detail about this idea, read the article starting on Pg. 26 of the special issue of Policy Quarterly
http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/publications/PQ/2016/PQ-Vol-12-No-1-2016.pdf

And I would not be shy about increasing the overall tax take in order to increase our social and environmental spending.