Our places: Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust
Image: Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust
Banks Peninsula Conservation TrustContext and purpose of the Trust
Ecological vision for 2050
“To create an environment in which the community values, protects, and cares for the biodiversity, landscape and special character of Banks Peninsula”
To pursue this vision, the Trust has adopted eight conservation goals for 2050:
1. All old growth forest remnants (more than 1 ha in area) of Banks Peninsula/Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū forest cover are protected and appropriately managed.
2. Rare Ecosystems are protected and appropriately managed.
3. The connections between land and marine habitats are managed to support viable populations of species that depend on both.
4. Four core indigenous forest areas of more than 1000 ha each have been protected.
5. Land primarily used for production and for settlement also supports thriving indigenous biodiversity.
6. Rare and common indigenous flora and fauna of the Peninsula are increasingly abundant.
7. At least two locally extinct species have been reintroduced.
8. Banks Peninsula/Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū is effectively free of pest animals (see project page this website).
Key Actions
The first action was to come together as a community and be recognised by the Government as capable of charting their own path to protect and restore biodiversity and to successfully implement and crucially, manage covenants in perpetuity.
This was no small feat, built on effective community engagement and a shared vision of the future. The key actions to reach the Trust’s ecological vision for 2050 are outlined in Video 1. These actions continue to be based on effective community engagement. Every action works together in a holistic way so that none conflict, and every positive action reinforces the others.
The term ‘appropriately managed’ in these goals means that every location is ecologically assessed before an individual management plan is created. This is essential given the incredibly diverse terrains and ecosystem types within small distances, and also given their close proximity to marine protected areas, reserves, and taiapure (estuarine and coastal areas that are significant for food, spiritual, or cultural reasons for Maori) that are affected by runoff from hills.
In addition to land covenants, the Trust runs workshops on topics including weeding, biodiversity, and ways to mitigate fire risk—an increasingly important subject as climate change brings hotter and dryer conditions to Canterbury, with Banks Peninsula particularly exposed to high winds and rates of evaporation, exacerbating fire risk. In July 2011, following the driest winter ever recorded, a lightning strike ignited a bush fire that spread through gorse and grasslands, but wherever it encountered native bush and beech forest, it was extinguished (Hugh Wilson, Video 1: 22-24mins).
Other programmes include the Wildside Project, a large scale collaboration of landowners, Christchurch City Council, Department of Conservation, Environment Canterbury, and the Trust to protect a variety of endemic, threatened, and iconic species including rare skinks and geckos, and penguins (Fig.1), including through its Pest Free Banks Peninsula project.
How these actions help mitigate the impacts of climate change
- A covenant is a powerful legal mechanism to protect conservation lands in perpetuity, while landowners retain full ownership and manage it with advice from the Trust. See their ten-step guide to the covenanting process.
- Protecting existing biodiversity through covenants is far more cost-effective that restoring native ecosystems on bare land. Covenanting ensures that the co-benefits of life-supporting ecosystem services continues; these services include providing habitats for endemic taonga species that pollinate plants, and, along with microbes and fungi that help recycle nutrients, helps the soil absorb and permanently store carbon and helping to retard or limit the risk of fires as the climate warms.
- Covenanted areas also act as sanctuaries from which a multitude of species can disperse into areas currently or soon to be restored (see the Trust’s ‘other programmes‘), which in turn draws down and stores even more carbon dioxide and further enhances ecosystem services.
- The processes to create and maintain covenants, the workshops and volunteering programmes, all promote knowledge and raise awareness of and appreciation for healthy biodiversity and its part in adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change.
- With increasing awareness and understanding of the importance of biodiversity as an essential contributor of ecosystem services, there
is also a growing awareness and understanding of how natural ecosystem services extend to farmlands, especially those adjacent to areas of high native biodiversity. Pollination is increased, more water and nutrients are retained in soils, reducing the need for agrichemicals, and soil erosion is reduced. The latter is particularly important as weather is predicted to intensify. Less erosion means less sediment washed into the ocean. Too much sediment would otherwise smother and kill coastal and marine ecosystems including salt marshes and seaweed (both of which absorb large quantities of carbon dioxide).
