 It is my great honor and pleasure to welcome Lou Sanson from the Department of Conservation. Lou has just a tremendous amount of experience living in nature and loving nature, and he is a steward of a third of all of New Zealand, which is a tremendous responsibility. So we're very excited to have you with us, Lou, and sharing some of the work you're doing at DOC in ways we can help. Thank you. There are Rangatirama, Wayne Celia Mohi, Tena Koutou, Rangatirama, Brian, Matthew, Joseph, Tena Koutou, Iti Iwitone, Tena Koutou, Tena Ra, Tena Koutou, Tena Koutou Katoa. So in my native language, you are a loving welcome to you all here, particularly those who have come from overseas and acknowledged those that have made this all happen and those that are important here. I first met Matthew and Brian through Charlie Arneson, who's managing James Cameron's properties, and we were over at Jim's place at Ponewy, and I was instantly inspired by the vision. We're working with Jim Cameron on converting a 1.9 million dairy farm back to a wetland, and I thought, you know, the inspiration of that, and we had this amazing afternoon out there, my wife was with me, and we were totally inspired by meeting Brian and Matthew and what Charlie was doing with James Cameron, and I thought, whatever these guys are doing, Doc has to be part of this journey. I've met up with Joseph, and he said, look, I would like you to come and talk here about some of the challenges that New Zealand faces. Some of the most exciting stuff happening in New Zealand is happening in this valley and through the Ruma Tuckers, and when we look, and I acknowledge you Celia, for the leadership of sustainability in the city, if you want to hear that. And what this city is doing is one of the most sustainable cities on the planet, both blue and green, and how we're connecting nature right the way through, from the home of our first conservation at Cuppity Island, right through this whole lower North Island, there is some of the most interesting stuff happening anywhere on the planet in terms of sustainability and conservation. I want to give you a snapshot of New Zealand's 500 years to set the context. We were one of the last places discovered on the planet, us in Madagascar. We were the least modified. Maori came here 700 years ago. They bought Curie, which was the first, if you like, pest, but they learned to live with the land. They learned principles of Matarangi Maori through local knowledge, how to love the land, and how to sustain the land. Europeans came here around about 1800, 1810. My forebears came into Petone in 1852 on one of the first ships. And we wanted to recreate Little Britain. And we didn't know how to work with the land. We had magnificent Kahakatea and Matai forests all the way up these valleys. My forebears had a town of sands and named after them because they were so good at clearing all this forest. And that's how our forebears came to New Zealand, that this forest was an enemy. It was dark. It was horrible, a completely different attitude to Maori. And we had to convert it all for sheep, for wailing, for timber. And I guess it was the lack of knowledge that we really had as we came to this wonderful place on the planet. But through various governments, we've set aside a third of our country for conservation. There's only 20 countries on the planet that have set aside more than 20% for protection. So we do sit at the cutting edge of trying to do something about it. Geologically, we're a young country. We were an accident of plate tectonics. We were upthrust with one of the fastest growing countries on the planet in terms of how fast the southern Alps have come up. We're linked through a great arc up to New Caledonia, which is another hotspot of biodiversity and demonism. So we do have this wonderful place, but we've done so much damage to it. Through rabbits, through possums, through stoats, through bringing gorse in. And unlike Maori who saw this landscape as a bread basket, we bought in all these things to recreate Britain and our European ancestry. The key problem was we were a land of birds. Mohua, our yellow head, is the ancient lineage of all the canaries in the world. The Rock Wren is the ancient lineage of all the Wrens in the world. So some of the most important things happening in birds are here in New Zealand. Our whole ecology had evolved with an absence of things with teeth. So our vegetation was built around mohas and we had plants that adapted to stop mohas taking them right down to the bone. We only had two mammals where there's amazing flightless bird like kakapo, kiwi, moa, tuatara, weta, you know, found nowhere else on the planet. We've got 13,000 species of snails. Only Papua and New Guinea comes close and there's one place in the very far north where you can put your arm out in a little valley and you can count 50 different species of snails in that arm's length. We've got more species of seabirds, albatross and penguins than any other place on the planet. And there's a tiny island to the south of New Zealand called the Snares Island. It's about 350 hectares and every night at this time of year 7 million birds come into that island and the sky goes dark with birds. It's one of the most pristine islands on the planet. It's got more birds on that, 350 hectares in the entire British Isles. So this is sort of the magic that Murray saw when they came here. And this is what we're trying to do is recreat this magic to shift albatross back, to shift petrules back. And we're trying to do some fascinating things. We're one of 35 biodiversity hotspots on the planet. And even our vegetation, we've got ancient species like miziptris that people come from internationally to see miziptris because it's one of the most ancient plants. We've got north of Vegas, the beach trees that link us with Gondwinerland, with South America, with Tasmania. And we've got these amazing tree ferns, which is our national emblem. So 150 years later, we're trying to bring two cultures together to fix the damage that we've done in such a short time. And I think one thing that really does differentiate New Zealand is our treaty. Our treaty partnership and our relationship with our indigenous people is as strong as anywhere in the world and a real will to bring these two cultures together to fix some of this damage that we've done. I don't think there's a more exciting time in New Zealand than right now. And it's because it's just not the government. It's actually a movement. It's the whole country wants to be involved. We live in this gorgeous country that's becoming the envy of the Earth. We're seen as a country living on the edge of the Earth. Our position on the planet gives us a natural advantage. And when you see some of the NASA data sets with 2 billion samples of CO2 circling around the ocean or the climate warming, you see the unique position New Zealand sits on on the planet. As you Google these NASA data sets of carbon dioxide, you just see how New Zealand just sits out in a remarkable place in the world. So our isolation gives us a tremendous advantage. So we're seen as a range of stunning environments. We're working to restore it. We're competing in markets 1,000 miles away. And we sit at the heart of New Zealand tourism. 32% of all international visitors come to New Zealand to experience our nature. It is about our national identity. People want to be part of it. And our primary partner is our treaty partner. And I quote an amazing deal that the New Zealand government did with the Tuhoe people, which goes to the heart of what this country is about in terms of co-management of terror or error and the fact that we alienated the indigenous people from this remarkable piece of land by giving it a national park status. When Tuhoe could actually live in that area. And Tamati Kruger, the comatua for Tuhoe, uses the phrase nature is God's wealth. And he is trying, working in partnership with us, to change our whole attitude to land. We don't use the land. We bring something to the land. So we want to bring the land back to its glory and just trying to change the culture. We're going to spend the first six months working with Tuhoe talking about what the land is. Is it male or female? How do we bring that piece of land to life? We don't own the land. The land owns us. And it's that remarkable relationship with Tuhoe people who are teaching us how we should actually work across this country. We've got 700 community groups. We've got 15,000 people out there weekends killing stoats, doing weeds, trying to bring back some of the wonder of the biodiversity of this country. We've got local government, people like Celia and Greater Wellington Regional Council who are doing some remarkable stuff. We have now got a better chance of seeing a Bellbird in Wellington City than you have in some of our national parks. We've had Saddleback come out of Zelandia and into the city. So it shows you what you can do when you put your heart to it. And this idea of mainland sanctuaries has gone gangbusters through Virginie. Dunedin has Orokanui. Auckland, we have Rangatoto Island. And we are trying to spill birds into the city and work with that city council to manage corridors where birds can go back into the city, much as what Celia is doing in Wellington City. We've got business. Air New Zealand is giving us $7.5 million because this is about our national identity. It's about bringing the DOC logo together with the Koro and saying, look, it is actually our nature that sells New Zealand. They are a major sponsor of our all-black blacks, but the all-blacks are pretty much unknown in Southeast Asia. It's the images of Rootburn, of Waikaremoana, of Abel Tasman that sell New Zealand. And this relationship with Air New Zealand is about bringing some of our protected species back onto our tracks. So having young Tuhoe people saving Kiwi at Waikaremoana, I've tried to get Takahee back onto the Milford track and actually giving a real profile for our marine protected areas. Genesis Energy wants to be seen having sustainable hydro electricity with one of our rarest ducks, the Pheo Blue Dark living below dams. Fonterra wants to change the culture of sustainability of the New Zealand dairy industry through a 20 million partnership and six big wetland areas that we are trying to restore. But it's more than that that we're trying to restore. Teo Spearings wants to leave one, if one thing that Fonterra can do is change the attitude of sustainability in our dairy industry through this relationship. He wants to take milk, he gives free milk to schools. He wants to take that into schools, then helping with riparian management. So his belief is this partnership can change the way New Zealand acts sustainability. The chief executive of Mitre 10, which is our biggest home handyman shopping chain in New Zealand, it's in virtually every town, wants to have sustainability at the core of all our towns, that the children come in and buy timber for stoke boxes, that when people are buying chemicals, they're thinking that if I put it on when there's no wind or early morning, I'm not actually going to impact bees or insects or things like that. So these are some of the thinking that's going on in terms of brand New Zealand. And then we've got some of the philanthropy, people like James Cameron, Mutt Lang, who just gifted to New Zealand 52,000 hectares of three high country stations around Queenstown, Julian Robertson with the work that he's doing on Cape Sanctuary in creating one of our biggest Kiwi areas to breed Kiwis to put back into our natural landscapes. And Neil Plowman, who's put 100 million on the table to invest in New Zealand's two biggest attributes, education and environment. It's also a focus on nationhood. And the government at the moment is very, very keen to raise that whole profile of nationhood for New Zealand. It's about our flag, it's about our money. If you look at our money, it's our protected species, it's our plants, our war veterans are all buried under a silver fern. So it is very much our connection, our Kiwiness, that is at the heart of it. For New Zealand's, there's two key issues that we are really trying to work with, that conservation totally underpins our economy, our ability to sell into international markets, the image that New Zealand seafood has, the New Zealand wine has, the New Zealand produce has, and that link to brand New Zealand. It's also about our national identity and who we are as a nation and it's everyone's business, it's not dock. And it's about people at places and people at places in the far south may have a totally different attitude to people in the far north. We have to be quite agile in thinking how we work with that. There's an emerging realisation how important this is to New Zealand and we do this in partnerships. The department has recently restructured to do that and that's why we're very, very keen on trying to build a partnership with what you're doing here because it just makes such good sense. We're given 350 million by the government and there's four things we do with that. It's about the health and the wellbeing of our natural environment. It's a sense of enjoyment of place which is the heart of rec tourism. People feel special in some of New Zealand's most magnificent places. And it's about a historic and cultural identity and bringing history to life and we do all these three things in partnerships. But we have one huge problem. 179 of 619 species are in trouble. Kiwis, nine out of 10 chicks will die without predator control. We're losing about 7% of our national emblem every year through dogs, stoats, cats. 25 million of our birds are getting killed every year by predators. 75% of our freshwater species are threatened and climate change is also kicking in and creating a whole lot of, we've lost a third of our ice of the Southern Alps in 15 years. We're losing frost-free zones. We're making it more competitive for introduced species like wilding pines, some of these weed species. We've got a window of opportunity to deal with things like wilding pines of the next five years. If we don't, the consequences are gonna be much bigger as these introduced species adapt to this emerging new world. We've got 240 invasive weed species that we have to get on top of. And Nelson lakes, we've got the highest wasp densities in the world. So these are all things that, you know, we have to, the conservation range of the future is gonna have to be agile, gonna have to understand climate change, gonna have to understand pests. To paparazzi, or the department I lead, is really about killing things. We have some huge tensions in New Zealand because the only really thing we've got at the moment, apart from community conservation, to do large scale ecosystem conservation is poisons like 1080 and Brideficum. Ideally, we don't wanna use those. But we need some technology breakthroughs. We just don't have them. And it's a holding guard at the moment. We can manage large scale with some of these poisons, but we don't wanna be using poisons. So ultimately, we need a genetic breakthrough or, you know, we just don't know. And that's why I'm so excited with what Matthew and Brian and Yosef are doing here. Because in this room could be the ideas that we need to help us with our problems that actually have potential, for huge potential for some of the problems overseas. And I just wanna go through some of the example of why this is so exciting. In Northman, we've got communities, the Tyndall Foundation, HSEBC Bank coming together. How do we actually work together on a landscape scale to deal with some of those issues? Neil Plowman has put 23 million into Project Jansuna, a project on Abel Tasman National Park. This is private money coming in. I'll get the pests down if the government keeps them at a low level. The next foundation we're talking about, how do we create these arcs in New Zealand that as climate change kicks in, we can protect our species that are so special to New Zealand. Predator Free New Zealand is an image that we would like to sign up for. We have a movement in New Zealand, the government won't sign up for it because it is just so expensive. But if we can think of those step changes along the way, how we bring science, community, new technology together to break through to Predator Free New Zealand, we think that is one of the greatest successes we could ever make as a country. We've got small towns like Fokutane, who seven years ago had four Kiwi left, have now, through community conservation, have expanded that to 150 Kiwi and now market that as the Kiwi capital of the world. 25p from each Kiwi burger in London goes to pay for Kiwis in Fokutane. That is the sort of things that we are fascinated by and the growth of the sanctuaries that I talked about. We've got an explosion of volunteers, baby boomers who recognise that conservation is about keeping fit and healthy and active and connected. The baby boomers are actually really on board in helping us. And we have our own projects like Battle for our Birds using 1080 and aerial control to look at land scale-style conservation. We have a new strategy called Our Nature, Conservation Leadership for what makes New Zealand special. We're trying to take a 10-year vision of what can we achieve with 3.5 billion that we've been given over the next 10 years. We have a vision that we're managing with community, 50% of New Zealand for pests, be it stoats, be it wilding pines, be it gorse. We want to restore 50 freshwater ecosystems. We're doing about nine at the moment and we want to represent a range of marine ecosystems. We've got the fourth biggest marine zone in the world. We were at the cutting edge of marine management. We've gone back and we want to push back into that space. We're very good at terrestrial management but we're still learning in that marine space. So just to finalise, Joseph asked me to think what were the big challenges as New Zealand and Carol and Al have given me some help. It is about sustainability. It's about sustainability of our nature. It's to be able to think like a pest, to think like a rat, a possum, a stout. One female rat can produce 10 offspring every eight weeks. That's the enemy that New Zealand faces. We've got to improve our ability to lure and bring these pests over wider periods. If we can get a possum to come to a lure over two kilometres, we only need 600 stations over the whole South Island. That's the sort of technology breakthrough we want. How do we manage pestry barriers? And Al's leading a new initiative which is about bringing 10 million of NEXT Foundation money, 5 million of ours, money from the Morgan Foundation to look at how we manage. As we start to clear this country of pests, how do we manage those pests coming back in? How do we control plant pests? The minister wants to launch a campaign war on weeds. Can we get the community motivated by these plant pests that have the tendency to do so much destruction to New Zealand? How do we get new detection tools for reinvasion for islands, for biosecurity, and everybody who's been in New Zealand the last week will know that we found an Australian fruit fryer in Auckland. These are the challenges that New Zealand face. We need to work out how to manage our farms sustainably. The nutrient management regimes in New Zealand are one of the biggest issues we have to break through in terms of our water is just so important. It's a rallying cause for New Zealand. We have to do something about our water. And how do we get technology to track species, nests in the air, in the sea? We've known that countries like Canada with Alberta have completely mastered predator-free. Alberta is free, completely free of rats. They manage it at the borders. Budapest City has managed it. We want to do it as a whole country. Ultimately, our New Zealand natural environments and clean water will be our point of difference. But this is just not a New Zealand movement. I was pleased to represent New Zealand at the World Parks Congress. 10 years ago, Nelson Mandela opened that Congress in Johannesburg, and it was pretty much doom and gloom. We're losing the war with biodiversity. We are, everything is going down. In Sydney last year in November, it was the increasing relevance of what we do of the protected areas of how important they are to the planet. 50% of the world's water is coming from protected areas. Some of the new tech, crowdfunding is new. Community is much bigger than it was 10 years ago. Google Ocean released some technology at World Parks Congress, which had two billion data sets of fishing boats around the world. You could Google in and find every movement a fishing boat had made for the last two years. You could see fishing boats illegally taking two catchers into Valparaiso and then meeting up with another fishing boat to transfer the loads outside the Chilean water. We could track every fishing boat in New Zealand. New Zealand spends 170 million on Orion P3 aircraft to track fishing boats. Conservation gets 350 million. Google Ocean is saying that actually, we may not need defence to do all this stuff. And just if we could take that 170 million that's spent on five aircraft patrolling our oceans and put it into conservation, imagine the impact we could make. So some of our biggest technology and medical breakthroughs will come through understanding our nature. And I applaud the work being done in Germany now to see if we can get a drone that mimics an albatronus's dynamic soaring. Imagine an aircraft capable of going around and around the planet on virtually no fuel because it's recreated in albatross' dynamic soaring. The work going on in the Antarctic to understand obesity and these critters in Antarctica have the fastest ability to create biomass on the planet because it's constantly dark from around about June onwards. And imagine if we really understand some of those. So thank you very much. These are some of the challenges I'm putting to you and it's a real privilege to be able to talk a snapshot of where we're at. Cura. Thanks very much Lou. We've got about, we're a few minutes behind schedule but we've got about 10 minutes for questions so I'd just like to invite questions from participants here. Great. Thank you for the kind sentiments Lou and for coming here today. Maybe you could just share with the group what is sort of the current best practice. We've talked a bit about pest control and this idea of predator-free New Zealand is also a story that I get really inspired by. So where are we now? What does today look like? What's a possum trap look like in the current situation? You've got Al here who's our best we have. Do you want to? So it's just Al? Al, who's possums? This is Al's business. Okay. So I'm very excited to be here too because down at the bottom of the earth we sometimes feel like we don't get enough input from international people at yourself so very pleased to talk to anyone about our problems. The current state of play for us in New Zealand is if we want to look after our biodiversity we generally have to nail stoats, possums and rats. They're our big three. If we could remove those, our ecosystems, native ecosystems would flourish. At the moment our only big landscape scale tool is an aerial one. And as Lou said, we don't really like doing it but we have to put aerial 1080 over big chunks of our landscape in order to knock rats down. The rats feed on the stoats it takes out the stoats as well. And for one season only we get some biodiversity recovery of our bird species and lizards and everything else. We also have some quite large community trapping efforts going on but they're exceptionally labour intensive and therefore they're always limited in scale and also in how far back they can get into our terrain. That's pretty much where we are now apart from smaller efforts on sanctaries where we either have fenced out every predator or we've got an offshore island which the seas keep the predators out for us. That's where we are at right now. But these guys, New Zealand is at the cutting edge of some, you know, thinking like a possum. We've got technology because we know a possum hates stuff on its belly. So we've got traps that spray on its belly and it goes and licks its belly. That's the sort of thinking that we've got to get into deal with these critters. So can I tell you where I think we need to go? So I'm managing a small team which is trying to work out how to completely remove rats, stoats and possums from big chunks of New Zealand. The only way we think we can do that right now is yes, we need some tools and techniques to remove them but we need to create a barrier across the landscape that essentially doesn't leak or if it does leak only a little bit. And then we need some really smart technology to detect anything that gets in behind and take it out before it establishes a population. So my small team is trying to work on the techniques to particularly detect very, very low numbers of those highly reproductive animals like rats and behind those areas that we're trying to clear. And we've started in a small way down in the Marlborough Sounds and we're working on that now but if anyone's got any great ideas or wants to help us with our thinking on how do we detect very low numbers and big landscapes, we'd love to talk to you. Please. And this is just coming to me now so it's very half-baked but in addition to everything you're sharing about, I'm curious about creating wilderness youth programs where there's some sort of gamification of trapping possums or something like that and also doing it in such a way where it could actually be an education opportunity to honor life so it's not just the thrill of the kill or anything like that but I know video games are huge and the idea of actually being out in nature and gamifying this process could be something to consider and it could tackle many things at once. Solving some of the pest problem but also empowering our youth and their personal agency and their ability to do something out in nature and be part of nature and that cycle and then one other thing, I don't know if Rebecca's in here but she's had some great ideas and I'd love you to share because that could also be incentive to do something with the fur and if people know there you could make something, that's something too. Yeah, we were getting creative the other night about the uses of possum fur and the ability for high fashion items inspired by Jeremy Moon's icebreaker taking things to another level of innovation and creativity from the edge of the earth in New Zealand so we'll see where that goes but I think one of the key questions with that is labor intensity and aside from chemical drops and technology, we're really needing to be creative about thinking about innovations for the future that aren't labor intensive. So let's, in 10 years, we've come remarkably, you know, we are the world leaders in island eradications and if we look back 20 years, how primitive we did it but we are able to work on much, much bigger scales with much lower poisons and we'd like to work without poisons so, you know, that 10 year vision and that's why we've appointed Al to run what we call zero invasive predators because there's something out there that is gonna be the breakthrough. We don't know what it is but because we've seen such a growth in the techniques that we can deal with possums with wilding pines, you know, we've bought our whole treatment of wilding pines for light years and 10 years but we would like to think what is possible in 10 years? I do agree with you, environmental education is that chance for step change. We've got all those baby boomers who want to be part of this. We actually need the next generation understanding what the Kiwi, what the silver fern is, what our wetlands mean, what our aquatic ecosystems mean. We know it's social media is the breakthrough. We are working with NEXT Foundation on a step change growth in environmental education in New Zealand because it goes to the heart of our national identity. Thank you, Lou, for being here. One idea that we were all brainstorming the other day while we were walking through the woods was in Silicon Valley there's a notion and I know it's here as well around hackathons and bringing together large groups of engineers and problem solvers for a condensed period of time and we were just brainstorming what would be like a trapeathon for addressing this challenge. That's pretty much why Al's here. To see if that's sort of... Because we're looking for ideas. So if I can just respond to that. No criticism of the Department of Conservation. I can't criticise Lou, of course, he's done a great job. But the thing for me right now in conservation is I'm an engineer and when I joined the department three years ago there were very few engineers involved in conservation. So we have lots of people like Carol and others that know, have deep knowledge about how ecosystems work and what makes them work well and what makes MOOC not so well but we need more engineers in conservation. We need people that can take the science and turn it into stuff that actually works. And so that's a call, we need more engineers. And can I just also pick up on the ladies' point over there sorry if I've forgotten your name. There's two revolutions in my mind that need to happen. One is a social revolution which is around the education and a cultural change around why our native biodiversity is so important to our sustainability ongoing. And so there's that big social question and to be honest I'm not very good at that, I'm an engineer. But and the other one that I'm probably most skilled at and would really need help with is the one around how do we bring the technology to bear for conservation? So that's... On that point, I'll also... United States Park Services having its 100 year anniversary this next year. And United States and Parks Victoria have got together with a concept called, I was just talking about needing more engineers. I'll also make a plea, we need more doctors. And Parks Victoria embedded a doctor in their management team to understand the health benefits of our nature. And they've now linked that to the whole Victoria health insurance scheme. San Francisco is doing the same. The US Park Service is really going to publicise healthy parks, healthy people. It's beyond doubt that people that refresh themselves in our nature have lower mental illness, have less obesity, have less diabetes. We've got, and this is what Parks Forum in Sydney was so great, we've got two big problems. We've got an emerging medical problems and we've got the relevance of our nature. And if we can put those together, we've got the chance to shift so much medical expenditure back into looking after our nature. So that's the vision the US Park Service is going for. It's the vision that the Australian government is going for and it's the vision that our minister wants New Zealand to go for is start making that connection about the health benefits of our nature. So I agree with our more engineers and more doctors and more working together. Also I'll ask a question first before I comment. Are you familiar with Earthcast? No, sorry. So Earthcast have managed to get a contract to retrieve the last 10 years of data of the major satellites floating around the Earth and it's free. So when I was looking at, I'm looking at a couple of agri-impact projects and one of the things we can do for the investors is demonstrate our progress through reforestation, et cetera. But the other thing you can do, we need the scientists to do it, is you can look back 10 years and what you might identify is progress or early indicators that let you get ahead of some of your problems, particularly on the agricultural side. And it's free. They just want you to use the data. So it's a, it'd be an important visual piece I think. But the question I really wanted to ask is how is it possible? Who's been, you said Alberta was the most successful on this plight we have of rats. What is it they were able to do to eliminate them and has any of it been applicable? So the Alberta government decided to manage its border. Admittedly it's got a lot more vast land. It hasn't got the forest that New Zealand has, but it was war on rats at the border and they do, they really pump investment into protecting those borders. Exactly what Al's trying to do with New Zealand, Alberta has done it for how many years? It might be 30 or 40 years and the Alberta government has decided they want to keep Alberta rat free. And so they do accept some rats do come across from British Columbia and things like that, but they nail them. And that's sort of what we're trying to do with Al. Yeah, I know, yeah, yeah. We've got a different problem in New Zealand, but our isolation does help us. Great, well thanks once again Lou for joining us. I know that there's still more questions and we've allowed quite a lot of spaciousness throughout the day. So if you're wanting some more discussion with Lou before you should off to the winery understand then there should be some time to connect.