Predator-free movement uniting communities and organisations

Monday, 4 December 2017

OPINION: Most striking about the first round of predator free funding applications I was shown recently is not the expanse of landscape that applicants aspire to rid predators from (something like 1.7 million hectares from Northland to Stewart Island). More interesting is how many third-party funders are lining up to back them.

Most of the country's regional councils have signed up to support projects in their regions. They're joined by iwi organisations, licensing trusts, philanthropic foundations, NGOs, individuals and businesses … each ready to invest in a plan to get rid of the rats, stoats, wild cats and possums that are destroying the things we love about New Zealand.

It presents an intriguing task for the Government's funding agency, Predator Free 2050 Ltd, which must now sift through the applicants and decide which go forward to the next round of due diligence and negotiation. The agency aims to complete a short-list before Christmas.

The Predator Free 2050 funding model plans to leverage $24m over four years from the Government with support from other funders. For the Department of Conservation (which a few years back surrendered to the fact that it can't, by itself, save the nation's native birds from predation), the model offers new partnerships with organisations, several of whom had been indifferent to working together in the past.

* Opinion: Is this the future of Predator-Free NZ?

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* Rats and stoats on way as predator-free Wellington project kicks** [off

](http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/84599730/predator-free-wellington-project-to-start-in-miramar-eliminate-rats-and-stoats)

It's a measure of how this movement is sweeping the country. In a nationwide survey released in November, more than 60 per cent of New Zealanders are aware of the predator-free movement and more than three-quarters think it's a great idea.

The predator-free crusade, however ambitious, has united people and organisations that care about our magical native species. Councils, which collectively may spend as much on pest control as DOC, see the value of a joined-up approach with other players in the community. These new partners range from conservation NGOs and schools to marae organisations desperately wanting to halt the decline of taonga species and farmers who, with the help of OSPRI, battle with possums spreading TB through their farms.

At the heart of the campaign is an army of volunteers – DOC estimates about 200,000 Kiwis give their time to conservation projects. Whether they belong to a community conservation project, an NGO like Forest & Bird, a school group or they're simply a family catching the rat in the compost bin so they can savour the delight of riroriro and tui in the garden – they are the unsung heroes of this crusade.

As the previous Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright observed, these groups need all the help they can get. They should be spending more time killing stoats and less on laborious funding applications and reports. For some, she said, their biggest problem was finding a treasurer! There are thousands of these conservation groups all over the country (in Auckland alone there are 1700) and many are now located on a map on the Predator Free NZ Trust's website.

It's pretty obvious we won't win this battle killing rats and stoats one at a time. There are millions of them and while aerial drops of 1080 are crucially important, we'll need some new weapons. Crusades spur innovations. New multi-kill traps like the Good Nature self-resetting trap are a good example. As are new wifi systems like Celium that connect traps to mobile phones and lessen the daily need to run trap lines, or the clever app that crowd-funds predator projects – Squawk Squad – that's helping to attract young people to the campaign.

Another enticing prospect is recent gene-drive research. The ability to alter a gene in a pest species, such as driving sterile offspring, would certainly accelerate population decline on our islands – but it comes with the perception of risk that will need a wide public airing. Genetic research has rapidly developed and the risks are better understood since the evolution of CRISPR, the breakthrough technique enabling scientists to edit DNA with remarkable precision.

The campaign is attracting global attention. In November alone, two large-circulation American magazines featured articles on New Zealand's ambitious plan. Both journals mix admiration and scepticism as they describe what no country has tried to do before.

And it goes without saying that the current budget isn't enough to win this war. It's a project born in a leap of faith which is not an expression that springs easily into the lexicon of Treasury officials. But what cheers them up is seeing a taxpayer's dollar leveraged to produce greater value through partnerships.

Singularly the most important partner is the community. That army of volunteers whose footmen are out there, every weekend, setting their traps …

Sir Rob Fenwick is chairman of Predator Free NZ Trust and a director of Predator Free 2050.