Informing wetland decision making: Scoping report to Department of Conservation

Abstract

The Department of Conservation (DOC) faces substantial challenges implementing its duties to protect and enhance New Zealand’s natural environment. These challenges traverse scientific, cultural, social, and economic realms, each of which presents gaps in objectives, constraints, and knowledge that introduce conflicts and uncertainty into decision-making. Two fundamental issues contribute to the difficulty of choosing the best activities for the Department to undertake; limited resourcing and a large number of objectives, frequently conflicting or poorly defined. These circumstances force DOC to forgo some projects, and ration resources to others. The seriousness of this situation is underlined by Joseph et al. (2009, p.329), citing their earlier work, “in 2006 only 22% of New Zealand’s threatened species were managed, and many of these were inadequately managed to ensure persistence”. The nature of the task is summarised succinctly by Margules and Pressey (2000, p.243) as: The effectiveness of systematic conservation planning comes from its efficiency in using limited resources to achieve conservation goals, its defensibility and flexibility in the face of competing land uses, and its accountability in allowing decisions to be critically reviewed. This report identifies the role economic approaches can play in systematic conservation planning, in particular, the role of economic valuation in the context of wetland management within the Department of Conservation’s Arawai Kakariki project.