Ongoing extreme weather events around New Zealand are a reminder that such events are becoming more common. It’s easy to look at any single event and think it was a one-off, but they keep happening. The Auckland floods, Cyclone Hale, Cyclone Gabrielle, floods in the top of the South Island, the list keeps growing.

We are also seeing more extreme wind events, including increasingly frequent tornados. Experience elsewhere in the world suggests we should also expect more frequent and severe heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. There is no denying what is driving these events. As the atmosphere and oceans heat, storms become more intense bringing these super charged weather systems to our shores.

We need to rapidly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels now, not next week, next year or after the next election. And offsetting is just not an option. To reduce emissions we must change our lifestyles and especially reduce our unsustainable consumption. Sadly, there is little evidence that we are making any serious inroads into reducing our CO2 emissions, so we can expect these weather events to continue and likely get even worse.

We also need to urgently build resilience in our landscapes, resilience against these extreme weather events because they are already with us. We know from the insurance sector that more and more homes and businesses are just not going to be insurable if we do not address resilience in a sustainable manner.

But more than that, ongoing storm events are threatening the viability of an increasing number of businesses across the country, they threaten our native biodiversity and they threaten the places we call home. In a recent study it is suggested that nearly 15,000 properties worth close to $13 billion could be damaged by floods in the next 35 years.

Clearing slash after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo: Alistair Guthrie

We cannot rely on engineered solutions alone for this resilience. Stop banks fail or flood waters overtop them, and we cannot afford to keep building bigger and bigger ones. Engineered solutions on their own will not work here in Aotearoa New Zealand because we are a geologically young country that is tectonically very active. Instability is a natural feature of almost all our landscapes. 

To build genuine sustainable resilience we need to focus on how we use our land and what its underlying vulnerabilities are, and based on this, manage our landscapes so that they are resilient to these extreme events. This will of course require engineered solutions, but will also require a much bigger emphasis on nature-based solutions.

Such a plan needs to be developed by the central government but it has to be enabling, not prescriptive, as we know that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will not work for a country as diverse as ours. And it needs to be applicable to every catchment across the country.

Building genuine catchment resilience will require us to think well outside our current land uses and management approaches. For example, it may be that clear-fell harvesting of pine plantations is simply not possible on any erosion prone hill country in New Zealand, or, in some areas, the most resilient future option may be to let rivers run free of stopbanks and naturally flood their lower catchments requiring land uses that are compatible with this.

It seems clear that land uses based on large-scale monocultures, whether they are ryegrass-clover pastures or pine plantations, are not resilient. To stand up to extreme weather events, Aotearoa New Zealand needs far more diverse landscapes to provide this resilience.

Recloaking Papatūānuku is a nature-based solution that proposes creating interwoven landscapes where native forests and wetlands are integrated with other land uses such as agriculture, horticulture and well managed exotic tree plantations in a diverse mosaic that builds resilience. It involves looking after both our remaining old-growth native forests, managing the plant and animal pests that threaten them, while at the same time restoring over two million hectares of new native forests and wetlands.

Think Like a Forest is a film that brings the vision of Recloaking Papatūānuku to life.  It explores the vision for and some of the people involved in developing a resilient future where we can address the challenges that climate change keeps throwing at us throughout the motu.

Silver Beech Forest. Photo: David Norton

To build landscape resilience in this way will require us to look geospatially at every catchment and make decisions about how we can best configure each area to reduce erosion and hold water back, while at the same time providing for sustainable primary production, safe places for people to live and work, and enhance our native biodiversity. And this must be done from the bottom up by those who know the land – farmers, catchment groups, Māori trusts and other local groups – with local and central government providing support. 

We urgently need a National Climate Change Landscape Resilience Plan with Recloaking Papatūānuku as the central pillar. And we need this plan now; it is not something that we can delay and argue about and put off into the future – it needs to be something that has the support of all political parties going into the next election because this is about the future of all of us here in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

The Auckland floods, Cyclone Hale, Cyclone Gabrielle and the recent Tasman/Nelson floods are not one-off events. They are the warning of what is to come.

David Norton is a contributor to the Recloaking Papatūānuku initiative, an urgent and ambitious programme to restore our indigenous forests and wetlands at scale. Think Like a Forest is a film that makes the case for Recloaking Papatūānuku, profiling the deep connections people have with forests and the role they play in building landscape resilience. Find out more about the initiative here and sign up to join the movement.

Catchment groups have been incredibly successful in Aotearoa at implementing landscape-scale environmental management on private land by coordinating integrated action across multiple landowners.

Projects undertaken have been diverse and include enhancing freshwater systems, introducing new farm production systems, native biodiversity conservation, plant and animal pest management, and exploring new income opportunities. Catchment groups also play a key role in rural extension by bringing experts in to talk to farmers and others in the area.

Recloaking Papatūānuku is an ambitious national-scale initiative to restore 2 million hectares of native forest and wetlands within the next 15-30 years, and will require collaboration with and leadership of catchment groups.

The aim of Recloaking Papatūānuku is to increase landscape resilience against increasingly severe storm events, help conserve our unique native biodiversity and permanently sequester atmospheric CO2. The initiative will directly tackle the effects of climate change and address the biodiversity crisis here in Aotearoa.

Recloaking Papatūānuku will primarily take place across private land that is used for farming, horticulture, plantation forests and as lifestyle blocks. This land has a range of ownerships including individual Māori and pākeha, Māori land trusts and other entities, and companies, but is usually not owned by the government. While public land will be involved, Recloaking Papatūānuku will by necessity be implemented largely on private land.

For Recloaking Papatūānuku to be successful, it needs to be driven from the bottom up, a “forest-roots” initiative, led by the people on the ground, with support from local, regional and central government.

Catchment group site visit. Photo: David Norton.

Catchment groups will play an essential role, because these groups know the current land uses and are aware of which  parts of catchments critically require restoration to reduce flood water flows and sediment loss.

Catchment groups are also best placed to undertake and coordinate the mahi that is required to implement restoration such as facilitating the ongoing management of restoration sites and the threats these sites face, from, for example, feral animals, weeds and fire.

Recloaking Papatūānuku is not a “one-size-fits-all approach” – rather the initiative as a programme would always be adapted to the local context, which again catchment groups are best placed to do.

Also, local people are the ones most directly impacted by extreme weather events such as Cyclone Gabrielle, so they have a direct incentive to do this work. The improved landscape resilience and biodiversity that will result from implementing Recloaking Papatūānuku will directly benefit local farmers, iwi, and communities – and catchment groups are fundamental for making sure that these outcomes are achieved.

There is a need for higher-level support of implementation from government agencies, tertiary institutions,Crown Research Institutes, and others. Support will be required for catchment mapping and prioritisation of sites for management, work programme development, ecological advice on planting sites and species choice, threat management, auditing of management inputs and biodiversity outcomes, and so on. Help will come from multiple sources and will need to be coordinated.

Provision of full-time coordinators for catchment groups will  be essential both to ensure that appropriate support is fed through to catchment  groups and to ensure that work programmes are efficiently managed.

Relying on voluntary catchment coordinators, who are often farmers, is unrealistic for a programme of this scale. The recently formed Aotearoa New Zealand Catchment Community presents a real opportunity to coordinate the high-level support required for catchment groups across the motu.

Recloaking Paptūanuku is “he kakano e kore e tatari kia ruia – a seed that can’t wait to be sown,” an apt phrase that came to us in a hui with Waihoroi Shortland, Te Tai Tokerau, Ngāti Hine.

But those seeds need to be planted by the local people, not by the government, and catchment groups are in a unique position to do this. Recloaking Papatūānuku represents a key opportunity to both secure the long-term viability of catchment groups, while at the same time allowing them to make a massive contribution through weaving ecological resilience back into our landscapes that benefits all of us here in Aotearoa.

David Norton is an emeritus professor at the University of Canterbury and strategic science adviser to Pure Advantage. This piece was originally published in Farmer’s Weekly.

Feral animals are having major impacts on biodiversity across old-growth and regenerating forests, in restoration plantings, on farmland (where they also eat pasture and crops) and in people’s backyards. They are also a major cause of erosion and floods, because they deplete the understorey and ground vegetation in native forests, releasing sediment and speeding up water loss. Feral ungulates are also vectors of diseases like Bovine Tb and predate on farm animals, especially pigs eating lambs.

Perhaps ironically, high feral animal densities also impact the quality of the animals that hunters seek to target. High densities lead to poor animal health and smaller animals.

There are multiple complex reasons why ungulates are so abundant in Aotearoa today. Changes in Government funding of feral animal control, and especially defunding of the Department of Conservation is clearly one factor. But reduced helicopter hunting, because of the Covid lockdowns, changing public perceptions of hunting as a sport, and the massive increase in monocultures of exotic trees across rural Aotearoa are also important. Finally, the simple mathematics of population expansion plays a key role. Populations of feral ungulates all increase at an exponential rate if left unchecked, and we are now getting into the phase of extremely rapid expansion.

Recloaking Papatūānuku is an ambitious initiative to restore 2 million ha of native forests and wetlands within the next 10-30 years, with the aim to increase landscape resilience, help conserve our unique native biodiversity, and permanently sequester atmospheric CO2. Ungulates are a serious threat to the success of this programme, and therefore our ability to tackle the effects of climate change and address the biodiversity crisis in Aotearoa.

Deer-browsed silver beech forest in Fiordland. Photo: David Norton.

The answer to this problem is to seriously reduce ungulate numbers through whatever tools are appropriate for an individual location (e.g. shooting, poisons, fences, etc). However, ungulate management is challenging because of ungulates’ large ranges, multiple land tenures are involved.

While it is easy to fence livestock like cattle and sheep out of areas being managed for Recloaking Papatūānuku, it is much harder to manage free-ranging feral ungulates using fences as they more easily go through or under fences than domestic livestock, and fencing is expensive and difficult to maintain in steep, rugged country. We also lack poisons for the effective control of these animals, so hunting is still the most effective control method at the scales required.

Ungulates also have a very high social value, which creates a significant tension in their management. To some Māori, pigs are seen as a Taonga, and many rural communities in Aotearoa are dependent on feral meat for protein. Feral ungulates are also a valued recreational resource and a small but important part of our tourism sector.

But perhaps within this social dilemma also lies a solution to feral ungulate management, especially in the context of Recloaking Papatūānuku. The successful implementation of Recloaking Papatūānuku will need to be at the catchment scale, which is also the scale at which feral ungulate control needs to occur. Controlling deer or goats or pigs at the scale of an individual farm or restoration site will not work, as animals will keep reinvading from the wider landscape.

Catchment groups and Māori Incorporations/iwi groups will be instrumental in doing the mahi for Recloaking Papatūānuku on the ground. While it is clear that controlling deer (and goats and pigs) to low enough densities for new forests to be established or existing forests to recover is a task too large for recreational hunters alone, it is key that these communities are engaged in the process of managing ungulate numbers.

Initiatives such as the Eastern Whio Link project illustrate what we might do. This project, located in the Waioeka Catchment on SH2 between Opotiki and Gisborne, is hunter and fisher-led and aims to protect the Nationally Endangered whio (blue duck) across private farmland and public conservation land. By supporting these ‘hunter led’ groups with funding to engage cullers and helicopter shooters, we are best placed to achieve landscape-scale ungulate control that not only allows new forests to be planted, but also allows established forests to thrive.

The flow on benefits of working with such groups is that while much of the meat from an ungulate control operation is unable to be recovered, a portion of it can be redirected to fill community freezers. Plus, the offcuts can be utilised as bait to lure stoat and cat traps to in turn to further increase native biodiversity.

Recloaking Papatūānuku aims for an orders-of-magnitude increase in native forest and wetland restoration across Aotearoa. It needs to be implemented at a “tree-roots” level, working closely with local communities, which hunters are a part of. And if hunters are invested in the programme from the get-go, then we should be able to work together to obtain the best outcomes for everyone – hunters, our native forests, local communities and all of Aotearoa.

David Norton & Sam Gibson are contributors to the Recloaking Papatūānuku initiative, an urgent and ambitious programme to restore our indigenous forests, building on the Ō Tātou Ngahere partnership with Tāne’s Tree Trust. Find out more about the initiative here and sign up to join the movement.

Short-lived exotic tree monocultures such as pines are not able to deliver these outcomes. In contrast, Recloaking Papatūānuku can, and will do it in a manner that also recognises the strong links between native ecosystems and the people of Aotearoa, both Māori and Pākeha.

There are several ways that Recloaking Papatūānuku will be implemented in practice:

1. Retaining and enhancing through control of invasive plants and animals our remaining old growth forests and wetlands across both public and private land. As well as their outstanding biodiversity values, these forests and wetlands hold vital stores of carbon that we need to keep in the biosphere. Healthy old growth forests are also vital for slowing the release of water and sediments into our waterways.

2. Establishing new plantings to increase the area of native forest, enhance connectivity between existing native forest remnants, help buffer small native forest remnants, create food resources for native fauna, and bring missing species back into the areas where they have been lost. We already have a huge amount of experience in Aotearoa in establishing new forests. Tiritiri Matangi (Auckland), Waiwhakareke (Hamilton) and Tiromoana Bush (Canterbury) are but a few of the many examples of restoration success that can be achieved in short time periods.

3. Allowing degraded areas, especially unproductive pasture, to regenerate naturally back into native forest. This process, also called minimum interference management, can be a quick and cheap method to re-establish native forest and works best when seed sources are close at hand. One of the best examples is Hinewai Reserve in Canterbury, but many others occur across Aotearoa, some as the result of deliberate management and others have developed unprompted.

4. Enriching existing regenerating and degraded native forests. Throughout Aotearoa, there are large areas of regenerating forests dominated by species like kānuka and mānuka, as well as previously logged forests that have lost their tall emergent conifers. Many of these forests are unable to develop back into a more advanced condition because of the lack of seed sources for mature forest species such as rimu, tōtara, mataī, tawhai/beech, tawa, northern rātā, pūriri, etc. Through targeted management, and especially enrichment with missing species, these forests can be enhanced and placed on a trajectory to a mature forest state.

5. Transitioning existing exotic monocultures to native forest where landowners do not want to maintain exotic trees. This can be done through selective thinning, perhaps with harvesting, or through clear-felling and then subsequent replanting with native forest species. The transitioning of the Hunua Water Reserve plantations by Watercare (Auckland City) to native forest is a good example.

6. As part of native forest restoration, establishing and enhancing wetlands high in catchments. These wetlands help retain water and sediment, increase habitat for native biodiversity and form important carbon sinks.

Kānuka forest that has regenerated on abandoned farmland, Wairoa district. With enrichment and ungulate control, this has the potential to develop into more mature native forest. Photo: David Norton/Recloaking Papatūānuku.

In all cases, both old growth and these new and enhanced forests and wetlands will require ongoing management to ensure that they continue to grow and develop over the decades and centuries it takes for them to mature. Key components of management are the control of invasive plant and animal pests, especially ungulates (deer, goats and pigs), which are perhaps the biggest threat to successfully implementing Recloaking Papatūānuku.

Native wetlands and forests need to be well connected, to enhance their function as flood stoppers, and to provide habitat for species who depend on these diverse environments.

For too long the western approach to conservation has been to separate people from nature, as epitomized by the New Zealand Conservation, Reserves and National Parks Acts. But if we are to tackle the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, we can no longer separate people from nature. We need to be in there nurturing our forests and wetlands to help heal the wounds we have caused. There is much that we as a nation can learn from Māori about this.

But it’s not only about how much native habitat we establish, it’s also about where these forests and wetlands are located in the landscape that matters. This is critical if we are to gain all the benefits they can provide us: landscape resilience, native biodiversity, water quality, carbon storage and of course the direct benefits people experience from being in nature. In many cases, new native forests and wetlands will be in heads of catchments to slow the flow of flood water and reduce sediment loss, but in other cases new forests might be in productive lowlands to enhance connectivity between existing forest remnants, provide habitat for birds and be located close to where people live.

In all cases, decisions about planting and restoration of native ecosystems need to be made locally and at the catchment scale. They need to be made by the people who live in these catchments, the farmers and mana whenua and local communities, as it is these local communities who will be doing the mahi and who will know the most about the whenua and who will be most connected and benefit from native forests and wetlands.

The first steps of returning native forest to Christchurch’s Port Hills – kānuka plantings established into pasture that will soon form a closed canopy. Photo: David Norton/Recloaking Papatūānuku.

Here are ten key asks from Government that would support Recloaking Paptūānuku:

1. Fast-tracking a high-integrity, internationally reputable ecosystem restoration / nature-positive incentives scheme for landowners.

2. If forestry remains in the Emissions Trading Scheme, exploring the opportunity to qualitatively differentiate forestry credits so as to better reward indigenous forests (and their co-benefits).

3. Driving investor confidence in a robust high-integrity, internationally-aligned domestic Voluntary Carbon Market.

4. Properly recognising our Nationally Determined Contributions on the Crown accounts.

5. Making Recloaking Papatūānuku part of our Global Biodiversity Framework commitments at October’s Convention on Biological Diversity COP.

6. Properly recognising and funding the critical role of the Department of Conservation and Predator Free 2050 in landscape restoration, particularly through the significantly scaling up of animal pest and weed interventions across the conservation and Crown pastoral estate.

7. Enabling Crown Pastoral leaseholders to register indigenous afforestation and restoration efforts in the Emissions Trading Scheme (through legislative amendments).

8. Outlining the role Government sees the private sector performing to support landscape-scale ecological restoration and how it will facilitate nature-positive investments, including by leading the international implementation of Nature-Related Financial Disclosure requirements.

9. Recognising, incentivising, and supporting enhanced measurement techniques in relation to the sequestration effects of pest eradication and other restoration interventions, including additional sequestration gains in pre-1990 forests.

10. An unequivocal, public statement by the Government in support of Recloaking Papaptūānuku for all of its benefits and a commitment to further exploring its implementation as a means to amplify and galvanise collective action.