Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 cost the country more than $14 billion. Spread across every household in New Zealand, that is around $7000 each. As the Government’s lead minister in Tairāwhiti during the recovery, I spent months with the people who paid far more than their share.
Federated Farmers hosted a meeting at the A&P grounds in Gisborne, and I had to front it. The crowd was full of farmers and horticulturists who had lost it all. The looks of despair on their faces that day have not left me. Silt and forestry slash poured down the valleys of Tairāwhiti and Wairoa, wiping out bridges and smothering farmland. Healthy native forest, wetlands and floodplains slow that water down. Nature is the cheapest flood defence we have, and we keep taking it apart.
Severe weather is arriving harder and more often. Insurers are already pulling back from some flood-prone areas and premiums keep climbing. The health of the land above your town decides what you pay to stay in your home.
Here is the flaw in how we count environmental value. Leave a forest standing and the carbon it stores, the soil it holds together, the water it filters and the floods it absorbs barely register in the ledger. Cut it down, mine beneath it or build on it, and the numbers appear at once: jobs, revenue, investment and GDP. One column gets filled in. The other gets a zero. Start an argument from zero, and extraction wins more often than it should.
That flaw sits at the centre of a decision being made in Wellington right now. New Zealand is rewriting its conservation laws for the first time in almost 40 years. Recently I joined six other former Conservation Ministers from Labour, National and the Greens, including Helen Clark, in writing to the Prime Minister about the reforms. Getting that group on to one letter is rarer than a sunny long weekend in Wellington.
We welcomed the Government stepping back from plans to make far more conservation land available for exchange or sale. Our concern is the proposal to turn the Department of Conservation (DoC) into a body that must enable economic development. Our letter put a figure on what is at stake. New Zealand’s public conservation land provides around $11b a year in ecosystem services. Yet we keep making decisions as if nature is worth nothing until someone works out how to dig value out of it.
I understand the instinct to reform. I founded a renewable energy company, and building anything in New Zealand can feel like wading through wet concrete. We need more generation, more transmission and more batteries. A conservation system that takes years to make simple decisions does not protect nature by being slow. Cutting red tape and cutting real protection are different jobs.
I do not think DoC should become an economic development agency. New Zealand split those functions apart in the 1980s for good reason. Someone in Government has to wake up each morning with nature as their only job. Economic development against conservation is fast becoming a false choice, because the storms, floods and fires now arriving send the bill for every natural buffer we remove.
Māori have never needed an investment bank to explain that whenua carries value beyond what can be extracted from it. Economics is now reaching the same conclusion through a different door, with natural capital, ecosystem services and nature-related financial risk. Destroy enough natural systems and someone eventually pays to replace what they once did for free. Sometimes no price is high enough.
So modernise the Conservation Act. Simplify the processes that deserve simplifying. Make decisions faster. Enable the infrastructure a low-carbon economy needs. Hold on to the clarity of purpose that has existed since DoC was created in 1987: that someone has to be responsible for conservation, first and fully.
The Minister of Conservation must drop the requirement in the Conservation Amendment Bill that DoC enable economic development, and keep conservation as its first duty. Ministers must put a value on natural buffers in every business case that touches public land. Parliament must fund the protection and restoration of wetlands, forests and floodplains before the next cyclone arrives, not after. We already know what the alternative costs.
The bees were worth something all along. We only noticed when the bill landed on us.
Kiri Allan is a former Labour Party Minister who held the portfolios of Justice, Regional Development, Conservation and Emergency Management. She was the lead minister for the Cyclone Gabrielle response in Tairāwhiti. She is the founder of renewable energy company Four Directions Fund and runs KLA consultancy firm.
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