‘Significant pressure’ on conservation funding

Thursday, 1 February 2024

The Department of Conservation (DOC) is unaffordable in its current form and will struggle to maintain its current work, the agency says.

DOC’s dire financial position was detailed in a briefing to the new Minister of Conservation, Tama Potaka, released on Thursday.

It described early findings from a financial sustainability review it commissioned last year, which looked at options for putting the agency on a “sustainable future funding path”.

Those findings concluded the “size and scale of DOC is unaffordable on current baselines” and that “current work is not enough to drive improvements in outcomes”, the briefing said. Significantly more - and more cost-effective - conservation work was required to meet its goals.

Funding pressures are not new for DOC. It controls around one-third of New Zealand’s land area, and has the dual task of conserving the country’s natural heritage and overseeing an expanding visitor network.

It has told successive Governments that its funding is strained, requiring it to spread its resources thinly and make difficult choices about what should be prioritised. The previous Government responded with increased baseline funding.

DOC’s most recent briefing, however, put in stark terms the problems it faced.

“DOC now manages more assets than we can afford to maintain in the long term,” the briefing said.

“This gap is getting larger due to a growing backlog of planned maintenance work, and the ongoing transfer of low-value, high-cost assets to DOC. Consistent underinvestment in the renewal and replacement of assets is reaching a critical level.”

The amount of resources it devoted to looking after visitor assets was reducing the funding available for its biodiversity work, it said.

Many of the agency’s assets were inherited when it was formed in 1987, and have not been replaced, including its network of back country huts. Some would soon reach the end of their useful life, “triggering choices about funding the rebuild of these or shrinking the network”.

“As the size of our current visitor network is not sustainable, there is a need to consider options to right-size it, address congestion, and review where, when and how much is charged,” the briefing said.

The financial strain would be exacerbated by a coming drop in funding. The previous Government had boosted conservation spending until 2025, largely through the Jobs for Nature programme. In 2026, that funding would stop, resulting in a 20% overall drop in conservation funding.

This was before the cuts being imposed on many Government agencies by the new Government, the briefing said. DOC was already making changes to improve efficiency, effectiveness and productivity, it said.

It will require tough choices for the new Government, which must confront the ongoing biodiversity crisis with an agency increasingly struggling to wage an effective fight.

Nearly 4000 native species are at-risk of, or threatened with, extinction. Despite significant effort, the state of nature is “in decline and significant habitats and species are at risk”, DOC’s briefing said.

Reversing that required controlling predators such as rats, possums and stoats. “Currently, we only control these threats on a small fraction of conservation land and are losing the battle,” it said.

Other priorities it listed included delivering a new Great Walk along the existing Waiau-Toa/Molesworth trail on the Canterbury and Marlborough border. Doing so was a National Party campaign promise.

DOC was also reforming its concession system, looking to recommit to Predator Free 2050, and expanding marine reserves.