NZ’s endangered plants and animals are worth saving, whatever the cost

Inform your opinion is a fortnightly feature in which someone with an informed opinion shares their thoughts about an issue, gives the background to it and explains why it matters.

Inform your opinion: You didn’t see the French government debating the cost of saving Notre-Dame cathedral, a national treasure, when it was gutted by fire. Notre-Dame will be restored, whatever the cost.

Yet last week, the Minister of Conservation, Tama Potaka, suggested that some of our endangered taonga, our unique flora and fauna, are too expensive to save. Understandably, this announcement caused outrage among those who care for our biodiversity.

Why is Aotearoa New Zealand’s unique biodiversity worth saving, and is the minister right?

Here we provide a scientific perspective on the importance of saving our flora and fauna.

Our unique biodiversity has famously been described by US scientist and historian Jared Diamond as “the nearest approach to life on another planet”. Equally quotable, biogeographer Gareth Nelson stated, “explain New Zealand and the rest of the world falls into place around it”. In other words, our national treasures are globally important.

From popoto (Māui’s dolphin) to kākāpō, pepeketua (frogs) to ngāokeoke (peripatus; velvet worms), our biodiversity is unique and, in some cases, ancient. The tūpuna (ancestors) of Aotearoa’s living and extinct wrens have been isolated here for 70 million years.

Yet for all our unique biodiversity, Aotearoa is one of the extinction capitals of the world. Successive waves of human arrival have resulted in the loss of 35% of our birds, from the mighty moa to the majestic huia. The freshwater fish, upokororo (grayling), was ironically only protected after its extinction.

The Minister of Conservation’s dangerous lack of ambition to save species could arguably instigate the latest extinction pulse in this country and significantly contribute to the world’s ongoing sixth mass extinction event.