Want to bring back biodiversity? This map can help

The first step in recloaking Aotearoa’s native ecosystems is knowing what used to be there.

Nov 15, 2023

Kia ora, welcome to Future Proof brought to you by AMP. I’m Ellen, thanks for joining me this week.

Two of the layers in the new restoration map show expected natural range for different ecosystem types (left) and areas where ecosystem cover has dropped below 15% (right). Image credit: Eco-index.

Imagine you arrive in Aotearoa before any other humans. What sort of landscapes would you encounter? Canterbury lowlands swathed with forests of mātai, kahikatea, and tōtara. Rolling dunelands along the west coast of the North Island. Rich swamplands in valley floors and around river deltas.

Significant chunks of these ecosystems have gone, cleared to make way for the places we live and grow food. But if we can restore them to even 15% of their former extent, research suggests, we could do a great deal of good for our native biodiversity.

“When your native ecosystem land cover drops below about 15%, that's when a lot of species go into freefall because they just don't have the resources. They don't have the home that they need to survive as a species,” says Kiri Joy Wallace, co-lead of the Eco-index programme. “Nationwide progress toward the 15% native ecosystem landcover goal will give us a good chance of bringing many native birds, reptiles, bats, plants and insects back from the brink of extinction.”

The Eco-index team, under the umbrella of the New Zealand’s Biological Heritage National Science Challenge, has crafted a vision to restore each ecosystem in a given catchment to 15% of its natural range by 2121, a “nice, long 100-year runway to work step by step, year by year to restore and get ourselves back to a healthy state,” says Wallace.

A new interactive map provides the first step on that journey, laying out what ecosystem types – forests, marshes, swamps and so on – cloaked the country before humans arrived. This is overlaid with areas where the ecosystem cover has dropped below that 15% threshold and needs a boost. Land managers can explore what ecosystem types remain on their patch, as well as which ones are missing.

In some catchments, native ecosystem cover has dropped very low. For example, swamps in Tukituki cover 1.29% of where you’d expect to find them and mātai-kahikatea-tōtara forest in the Ashburton-Hinds catchment covers just 0.54% of its expected natural range. Wallace notes that those brightly coloured ecosystem types can’t be offset by the other types that are faring better, like beech forest, since different ecosystems are home to unique assemblages of plants and animals.

Zooming out for a whole-country view, the eastern South Island and large tracts of the North Island glow pink and orange in this second layer, signalling areas of loss but also of potential. “This is a great opportunity to see where we could do better,” says Wallace. “And we can celebrate where we're doing well already, and protect and look after those places so they don't slip into that very bright pink.”

Further map layers show marae locations, regional council boundaries, community groups and biodiversity stories. These aim to “encourage people to see this as a team effort,” says Wallace. “We have designed it to be like a choose your own adventure story. It is a lot of work, but we can learn a lot and make the most progress working together.”

Future updates to the map aim to incorporate satellite data with ecosystem types identified by AI, so we can collectively monitor our progress towards that 15% goal.

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The world’s words aren’t matched by climate action

“Emissions are still rising – more slowly than they used to but, nonetheless, rising. Instead of getting pushed down, that needle is fitfully jiggling above zero, clawing into the positive digits when it needs to be deeply pitched into the negative,” writes Zoë Schlanger for The Atlantic. Schlanger deftly summarises our current “climate purgatory”, with both signs of hope and frustrating contradictory actions. For example, governments are still planning for fossil fuel extraction to 2050 and beyond, at a scale that would burn past 1.5 and even 2°C warming. Both Canada and South Africa are set to miss their 2030 emissions reduction targets – in South Africa’s case, because it has decided to keep eight coal plants online. China has unveiled its much-awaited methane plan, which doesn’t have any targets for actually reducing methane. Schlanger lands on policy as the ultimate arbiter of our fate: “Policy, and only policy, appears to make that difference. It represents the choices that our leaders make about when to finally change course.”

Do Fonterra’s plan to cut emissions stack up?

Dairy giant Fonterra, New Zealand’s largest emitter of planet-heating gases, has released a climate roadmap including a target to reduce collective on-farm emissions intensity by 30% by 2030, compared to a 2018 baseline. The reduction would be achieved through a variety of approaches including supporting farmers to adopt best practice, improving fertiliser use, and planting trees to sequester carbon.

Newsroom’s Rod Oram notes that this target is less ambitious than some of Fonterra’s biggest customers, like Nestlé. Fonterra told RNZ that the target wouldn’t lead to a decrease in stock numbers, and also defended the target being based on emissions intensity, rather than an absolute reduction in emissions. Separately, Sarah Walton, co-director of the He Kaupapa Hononga Otago’s Climate Change Research Network commented, “While the Forest Land and Agricultural Guidance from the Science Based Targets initiative does allow for intensity emissions in scope 3, the UN recommends absolute targets for emission reduction and I would concur with the UN. By only having intensity targets for scope 3 there is the chance that Fonterra would increase these emissions overall while being emission efficient in relation to the intensity measure. Thus the reason for having absolute emission targets.”

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