The senior policy analyst with the Environmental Defence Society told that the DoC’s plan shows that the state of the marine environment is in terrible condition. He said that the nation has a well-resourced and politically-powerful ministry [MFish] whose core focus is utilising and exploiting it. We don’t have an effective organisation that can really counter-balance that in the policy-making area.
Al Morrison, director-general of conservation, has proposed mainstreaming the marine unit’s functions asking staff in DoC’s 13 conservancies to absorb the marine unit’s work. The restructuring follows a ministerial directive to trim $8 million a year for the next three years – or 3 per cent of annual funding – from the department’s budget.
Mary Sewell, senior lecturer in marine biology at Auckland University, opined that the move follows the Government’s age old efforts to develop an overarching Oceans Policy and at the same time attempts to give DoC more clout to create marine reserves have taken six years to be brought before Parliament.
It is true that marine life is under threat from coastal development, sediment and agricultural run-off, aquaculture, commercial fishing and proposed mineral extraction. Sewell informed that marine biodiversity faces additional long-term threats from climate change.
According to the scientists DoC’s conservancies, expected to pick up the marine work, focus primarily on land-based conservation and have enough on their plates. Liz Slooten, an associate professor of zoology at Otago, said that a tiny proportion of DoC staff are focused on marine as it is. A spokeswoman for Conservation Minister Steve Chadwick said the Government “remained committed to progress its agenda for marine conversation, through the Marine Protected Areas Policy”.
