Hauraki Gulf: Our sea is sick and needs marine protection before it's too late

Saturday, 9 April 2022

Tīkapa Moana Te Moananui-ā-Toi evolved into one of the world’s significant ecosystems over millions of years – but we’ve almost destroyed it in less than a century. Brad Flahive reports.

In over a million hectares of sparkling blue waters in the Hauraki Gulf, beautiful beaches bring vistas of spectacular pest-free islands, breaching Bryde’s whales and the seabird capital of the world.

Alongside the east coast of Auckland and Waikato, anglers search for our favourite fish while divers scour the seabed plucking out crustaceans and shellfish.

Sailors master elite skills that beat the rest of the world while boats jostle for position carrying city commuters and island hoppers.

Before our modern times, the Gulf’s rich waters helped sustain iwi for hundreds of years, inspiring environmentally-conscious customs and traditions.

**READ MORE:

* Iwi worry scallop bed closure will concentrate fishing in rāhui area

* Fears Coromandel's two-year scallop rāhui will squeeze other Hauraki Gulf fisheries

* Decades of work before Auckland's Hauraki Gulf fully restored, iwi leader says

* Hauraki Gulf's marine protection areas expanded, but no action on dredging

**

Now, Tīkapa Moana is one of Aotearoa’s most valued and intensively used resources, generating more than $2.7 billion every year from aquaculture, fishing, tourism, shipping and ferry transport.

But look beneath the blue veneer and a different story emerges.

Our precious taonga is suffering from overfishing and unprecedented sediment choking the natural wildlife.

Barren rocky reefs overrun with kina plague the seafloor where once great kelp forests supported schools of snapper, blue cod and crayfish.

Kina is the main herbivore in our coastal marine environment, and until now, its population was controlled by predators like snapper, but overfishing has caused its numbers to swell.

Every day, the Gulf chokes from sediment and nitrogen, which floods the Firth of Thames from over 5000 kilometres of waterways. A lot of it flows through intensive farmland without riparian planting acting as a natural filter.

Hundreds of hectares of mussel beds at the top of the bay were dredged out in the 1960s and never recovered – these shellfish filtered all the nutrients and sediment entering the Gulf from the Piako and Waihou Rivers.

More than a century of destructive fishing practices, both commercial and recreational, indiscriminately kill non-target species that generally would be contributing to the ecosystem. While bottom trawling, Danish seining and scallop dredging destroy the seabed.

In 2000, the country established the Hauraki Gulf as our first marine national park to protect its life-supporting capacity, nature, and history.

The legislation forced the slew of local councils and government departments with jurisdiction over the Gulf to consider these objectives in planning or fisheries decisions.

However, except for a handful of tiny marine reserves, commercial and recreational fishing was allowed to continue throughout the entire Gulf.

Twenty years later, the park’s creation has failed to prevent near ecosystem collapse.

Since 2000, a State of our Gulf report was produced every three years and described ecosystem collapse due to overfishing, invasive fishing practices, marine dumping and sediment and nutrient runoff.

Every report warned we are eating the Hauraki Gulf to death.

Crayfish, which was once the Gulf's most abundant species, are now functionally extinct, while the snapper population is about 17 per cent of its natural population before fishing.

Scallop, mussel and pāua populations have also declined for decades, while a quarter of fish in the Hauraki Gulf was found to have plastic in their guts.

It’s also precarious above the waves; Seabirds that call the Gulf home are on a perilous trajectory of decline, according to the State of our Seabirds 2021 report.

Up to 22 per cent of all the Gulf’s seabirds are threatened, compared to 4 per cent 20 years ago.

The perilous path of the Hauraki Gulf is explored in a new documentary by Republic​ Films, in association with Stuff.

SeaSick is a seven-part series where producers take a deep dive into the Hauraki Gulf to understand what is making our sea sick.

The series tries to understand where the threats are coming from and how we can be part of the solution.

But what happened to get us to such dire straits?

Essentially, we continue to take too much out of the ocean, and we don’t care enough about what we put in.

This isn’t news, but the situation has been exasperated by a lack of stewardship. However, all might not be lost.

New Zealand’s first marine reserve, Te Hāwere-a-Maki or Goat Island, was established in 1975 and shows us how the marine environment can recover if we leave it be.

Just west of Little Barrier Island in the Gulf, the tiny island has bounced back to life to what all the coast was probably once like.

Crayfish and snapper numbers grew once the area was protected. They fed on sea urchins, regulating their numbers and allowing the kelp forests to return.

It was in the recovery of that coastal environment scientists learned kina barrens didn’t occur naturally but from overfishing.

Since it became a protected reserve, more than 100 species of fish have since been recorded while invertebrate species number in the thousands.

However, in the rest of the Hauraki Gulf, only a fraction of the coastline has been protected from fishing – just 0.3 per cent.

In contrast, we protect one-third of our natural area on land through national parks and conservation.

But in 2013, mana whenua, environmental groups, fishing, aquaculture and agriculture sectors came together to form Sea Change. Four years later they published a report that would catalyse the statutory bodies into action.

The Sea Change report recommended more than 180 interrelated actions spread across four overarching concepts: guardianship, replenishing the fish stocks and aquaculture, biodiversity and water quality and prosperous communities.

In June 2021, Minister for Oceans and Fisheries David Parker and Acting Conservation Minister Ayesha Verrall eventually responded with a new government strategy: Revitalising the Gulf – Government action on the Sea Change Plan.

The plan included the creation of 18 new marine protected areas – expanding the protected areas to 17.6 per cent of the 1.2 million hectare marine park. However, little of this is in genuine ‘no-take’ reserves.

Advocates and experts agree the plan falls well short of the 30 per cent that scientists, and the United Nations, claim should become reserves in order to restore the severely depleted ecosystem.

They also want marine dumping to end and better fishery quota management to restore its almost barren seabeds and reefs.

The Government plan stated the goal for high protection areas was to “protect, enhance and restore the full range of marine communities and ecosystems”.

It said further discussion with mana whenua would determine precisely what management of these sites would look like.

Māori have policed Aotearoa’s ecosystem for centuries by declaring a rāhui when a source is under threat.

Nurtured through generations of mana whenua, a rāhui prohibits extraction to make sure a source is sustainable and future generations can use them at the same or better rate than is currently available

Healthy marine ecosystems are essential for society. They provide food, and medicines, and are natural defences against coastal erosion and inundation.

They are integrally linked to global climate and can help scientists predict the impact of climate change.

There is no doubt we have pushed one of the world's most abundant ecosystems to a tipping point – but there is still a chance we can reel it in from the edge.