Source: Radio New Zealand
A study aims to investigate the most affordable and effective ways of restoring native habitats across the lowlands of the Motueka (pictured), Moutere and Riuwaka rivers. RNZ/Tess Brunton
A study of river catchments in the Tasman District aims to make native restoration easier for landowners, while also working to protect communities during extreme weather events.
Back-to-back floods last winter caused extensive damage to farms and rural properties, with crops inundated with silt, fences washed away and land lost to swollen rivers. The repair bill for the Tasman District Council alone was estimated at $50 million, while the costs of insurance claims from the event were estimated at $37.4m.
The feasibility study was being led by Kotahitanga mō te Taiao, an alliance of 17 organisations in the top of the South Island including iwi, local councils and the Department of Conservation, and environmental not-for-profit The Nature Conservancy Aotearoa New Zealand.
It aimed to investigate the most affordable and effective ways of restoring native habitats across the lowlands of the Motueka, Moutere and Riuwaka rivers.
Small scale restoration work already underway
For Debbie Win and her family, a stand of mature forest in the middle of their Dovedale farm had always been precious.
She said they fenced the area several years ago and had undertaken dedicated work to trap pests and remove weeds like Old Man’s Beard. The work had transformed the forest floor, which was previously bare.
Now, tiny lancewoods, ferns and beech tree seedlings were scattered beneath the established trees.
Washouts were still visible after last winter’s floods last caused widespread damage across the district, including on the Win farm, cutting off access to stock, washing out a large culvert and scouring out the land.
“It was probably the biggest heartbreak I have ever felt, I got to the stage where I couldn’t walk out the door, our [place] was wrecked, I couldn’t even begin to process what had happened down the valley.”
Former orchardist Dave Easton had spent the past decade constructing a wetland in the place of what used to be an apple orchard, but was originally a wetland on his property near the Moutere Inlet.
He was reversing the work put in by his forebears, but thought they would be proud of what he had done. Easton had funded all the restoration work himself and did not want to think about how much he had spent.
“We’ve got 65 different native species that have been planted so we are trying to establish that biodiversity hub and if we protect it and do predator trapping then we get the birds, in my dreams I would love to have kereru nesting on the property.”
His son, Elliot Easton, who co-ordinates the Moutere Catchment Collective said much of the land in the catchment was heavily modified and had been used to grow apples, grapes, hops and graze stock, which had an impact on sedimentation in the nearby inlet.
He noticed many landowners were starting to think about their properties differently.
“A lot of the land, especially in the Moutere, is not actually that productive so you have a lot of stock that is sometimes there as maintenance, like glorified lawnmowers, so people are really keen to establish natives on marginal land and sometimes across their whole property.”
He said time and cost were the biggest barriers but since the group was formed five years ago, more than 500,000 native trees had been planted and 50 kilometres of riparian fencing installed.
“The inlet has had a particularly hard time with a lot of sediment getting in there so a co-ordinated approach to mitigating sediment and stabilising waterways by planting them up is really important.”
Sky Davies runs the Tasman Environmental Trust and owns a blueberry farm in the Graham Valley.
In the last few years, she and her husband had planted a couple of thousand natives on their property.
She said the planting was the easy part, it was the maintenance and keeping weeds at bay that was the hard part as it could be time consuming and costly.
“What we really need is some ways to make the finances of it stack up and having some practical ways of rewarding landowners for that work, that’s what will lead to more scale and landowners being able to do more of it.”
A restoration model that can be used nationwide
The Nature Conservancy Aotearoa interim director Erik van Eyndhoven said the study aimed to investigate the most affordable and effective ways of restoring native habitats and would also look at how to increase resilience during increasingly frequent storms.
“This catchment has just been hit by a couple of really big events this last winter and there is a view if you do native restoration in the right places and the right way, it can actually help with some of those storm surges and those flood peaks.”
He said the country needed to find innovative ways of funding restoration work.
“What other mechanisms can we leverage, things like carbon markets or emerging biodiversity markets … or finding people who are willing to pay for this work at scale, and making that accessible to landowners to help take some of the pain out of the equation for them.”
Kotahitanga mō te Taiao co-chair Hemi Sundgren said it was important to take a collective approach, because large scale restoration work could not happen alone, and iwi leadership, combined with community knowledge and technical science was critical when trying to address the challenges the environment was facing.
The organisation had a shared goal of restoring up to 15 percent of lowland forest cover in the top of the South Island.
“This rohe suffers, like any other, significantly from sedimentation so the restoration of the lowlands project and the catchments is really, really important. The approach that we take from the mountains to the sea, is a great values and principles-based approach.”
The study was expected to take a year with landowners and community groups across the Motueka, Moutere and Riuwaka river catchments being called on to share their experiences.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
