Money would help wildlife

Increasing commercial activities on conservation land could result in better protection for New Zealand's threatened native forest and birdlife, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright says.

An increase in commercial use of the conservation estate was going to happen, she told an audience at a University of Otago symposium yesterday.

Revenue from commercial activities should be channelled back into protecting conservation values, land, and native flora and fauna, she said.

"There is clearly growing interest in gaining revenue from the conservation estate." The "biggest danger" to conservation land was not commercial operations or mining ventures, it was the continual onslaught of native species by pests, she said.

Most New Zealanders thought possums were responsible for the destruction of native forest, but the animal was only one part of the equation, she said. Possums, stoats, and rats were eating native forest, birds, and wildlife and were a plague on huge tracts of the conservation estate.

"I have come to think of them as the evil triumvirate," she said.

Only one eighth of the land administered by the Department of Conservation had pest control operations in place, she said.

Doc earns about $13 million in revenue from concessions for commercial activities on the public estate, the equivalent of about 3% of its total funding.

The current revenue from the 5000 concessions Doc granted was a "drop in the bucket", she said.

Money also came in from mining permits, but a preliminary investigation indicated there was little return to Doc from the permitted commercial operations.

The Commission for the Environment was investigating commercial use of conservation land and was expected to deliver a report to Parliament next year, she said. It would explore what form of revenue could be derived from commercial use of the conservation estate. This could include straight monetary payments, or "paid-in-kind" arrangements, such as pest control, track provision, track maintenance, and hut use, she said.

"The kind I'm interested in is pest control, so let me repeat my mantra. Pests are the greatest threat to the conservation estate," she said.

Doc needed to take more control of the negotiation process when dealing with concession applications, she said.

Payments could then go towards dedicated pest control operations, Dr Wright said.

People were grieving over the deaths of thousands of sea birds in the Bay of Plenty recently, but "how many more birds are we losing in our forests [to pests]?" she asked.