The river corridor is probably the largest area of managed retreat in an urban centre worldwide. How can our experience inform processes of managed retreat elsewhere? The question is central to this project, which has developed a model of ‘retreat’, ‘relocation’ and ‘re-imagining’. Re-imagining asks how can the land be re-used for projects that further lower environmental and social risks.
Colin D. Meurk
Colin D. Meurk ONZM, landscape ecologist, citizen science advocate and red zone project proponent
My background is in ecology. After Honours at the University of Canterbury, I completed a PhD at Otago under the well-known ecologist Sir Alan Mark on alpine plant ecology. My first real job was with Grasslands Division of DSIR in Southland and then I moved to Botany Division, DSIR in Lincoln, which became Landcare Research, Manaaki Whenua. I'm now a research associate there and have adjunct appointments at both Canterbury and Lincoln Universities. I’m involved with multiple NGOs through Christchurch and beyond, including as chair of the trust that runs the New Zealand hub of the iNaturalist app.
How did you get involved in the red zone?
I was one of the early advocates for the protection of Travis Wetland just immediately
north and adjacent to what is now the red zone. I’d been involved with proposing a fenced eco-sanctuary around this wetland before the earthquakes. We didn't progress that then partly because of logistical and financial issues. After the earthquakes, it became apparent there might be an opportunity to establish an even larger and more viable eco-sanctuary, incorporating the red zone area between Travis and the Avon river. I was subsequently involved in several other organisations associated with ideas for the red zone. These included the Avon Ōtākaro Forest Park (AOFP), the Avon Ōtākaro Network (AvON), and the Christchurch 360 Trail (https://christchurch360trail.org.nz). I was an informal advisor to the Eden Project (now abandoned), and a founder member in 2020 of the Waitākiri Eco-Sanctuary Trust (www.ecosanctuary.nz, which includes a map of the proposal), which picked up the original idea. So I’ve been involved in various ways with a range of projects for the future of the red zone.
Can you describe what you’ve been doing in these projects?
They've all occupied chunks of time at different times. The Christchurch 360 Trail has been a long term project designed to showcase the different ecological habitats around the city, by means of an eight day walking circuit. It was inaugurated with Council support in 2016. I've got a bit bogged down periodically with this lately, because of plans to develop the Bexley wetlands, done without consultation with us in the Trail trust, which means it has to be re-routed. There have also been long standing issues with the Estuary Trust about trail access to the estuary edge, and some problems with the Council about routing adjacent to country roads beyond the airport.
My involvement with groups like AvON and AOFP has been more peripheral. I’ve been on the AvON board since the early days, partly to represent the other interests such as the eco-sanctuary and the 360 Trail within that group, since AvON acts as a sort of umbrella for community organisations that have an interest in the red zone. With the forest park, it’s been mainly in the form of planting days and casual meetings and laying out plants for them on those community planting days around Brooker Avenue, which is also part of the intended eco-sanctuary site. The eco-sanctuary has been through several iterations, and that's taken a certain amount of time.
So how did you get involved in so many initiatives in and around the river corridor?
I sometimes call myself an ecologist at large. I suppose the basis of it is a bit of a parochialism towards Christchurch and Canterbury: I want to see it do well. I'm conscious of the bigger picture to do with biodiversity and biodiversity loss. Globally, we're in the middle of the Sixth Great Extinction and New Zealand, sadly because of its unique biogeography, has particularly serious problems. So we have a special duty to provide stronger support and protection for our unique species and one of the means of doing that of course is to provide habitat. And to incorporate nature into the urban, in a context where because of our colonial history people no longer identify with or relate to our indigenous nature. Instead, they think nature belongs miles away up in the mountains and national parks.
So I've also been part of a movement to promote the concept of ‘national park cities’ which turns the notion on its head and says no, nature belongs all around us. We're part of nature and we need to recognise our special identity and our unique contribution to biodiversity in the world. We have a duty to protect and look after it and rebuild it where it's been lost. So that the larger philosophical, ecological sort of vision that then converges on the particular place that I happen to live in. I'm always looking to how to develop or advance protection of nature, but in particular to re-engage the population, the local community with that nature. Critically, for much of our iconic wildlife that have zero-tolerance of introduced predators, providing habitat alone is not enough for their survival. We need predator-proofed sanctuaries, hence the motivation for this eco-sanctuary initiative. It is also a vital experience for the community, who through personal encounters with this hitherto absent wildlife, then begin to identify with it and further desire to protect it.
One of the first things I did when I came back to Christchurch in the mid 1980s was I saw an article in The Press about Rick Tau senior doing some sort of restoration work around Kaiapoi pa and I contacted him and we did some planting there. That followed through into the 1990s with the campaign to save Travis Wetland from subdivision. It was about that time that I started to build a reputation and professional interest in urban ecology and restoration ecology. I think it's fair to say that I was one of the pioneers in New Zealand of those research areas. I didn’t always have a lot of support professionally: I remember when I was making submissions to get Travis Wetland protected, the former Director of Botany Division, dear Henry Connor, actually complained to the then Divisional Director, saying that I that I shouldn't be allowed to do this sort of conservation advocacy. So I was always in a little bit of trouble.
But then I was also in a research programme that started in the late 1990s through to the early 2000s on low impact urban design. That enabled some of the background research to be done legitimately, and as a result, for example, we produced a booklet on how to put nature into your neighbourhood (How to Put Nature into Our Neighbourhoods. Urban Greening Manual (landcareresearch.co.nz).
How did the earthquakes provide you with an opportunity to advance this agenda in the city?
I could go back to my childhood: my grandparents owned a place down Rockinghorse Road, so I used to come down there every weekend and play on the sandhills. I had also lived in New Brighton as a six year old and went to school there. So I had a lived connection with the area. And being on the Travis Wetland Trust, we saw the opportunities that the red zone might provide to join things up, not only to create habitat but also provide a sanctuary environment. I put together lots of ideas about the actual revegetation of the red zone, according to the different environments that it encompasses, from sand dunes to landfill to floodplains and coastal salt marsh. And then how one could start nodal planting through the whole area and build up the habitat, to looking beyond that to incorporate an actual fenced sanctuary that would protect our iconic charismatic wildlife. And importantly also provide the opportunity for Christchurch citizens to experience that.
It seemed a logical extension to look at how one could expand the original idea for a fenced eco-sanctuary at Travis by incorporating the adjacent red zone. This would be close to the 200 hectare standard that is represented by Zealandia in Wellington, and which seems to be a good minimum size to support critical mass populations of wildlife. How might we join those up? We conceived the idea of a wildlife bridge across Travis Road, since it is a state highway. We even had a bridge designer guy from Auckland put together a conceptual kind of idea of what that might look like. It would connect to the Burwood part of the red zone, which would be fenced and reforested basically. There was a lot of pushback from various quarters, some in the City Council. Not so much from the community: in fact the proposition was the most popular red zone project when AvON ran a public poll a decade or so back. It seemed like the most probable large project apart from things like cycleways and walkways, because the Eden Project was going to cost in excess of $100 million, the rowing project was similarly expensive. We had some initial costing done on fencing, which came out at $12-15 million. But we were a group of volunteers at that point without means of generating a lot of financial support. Chrissie Williams chaired an initial meeting; she put together some graphics. Rick Tau Jr. was there from mana whenua. This was about 2014, or earlier.
But we didn’t have a lot of momentum; Chrissie pulled away. We had some good student projects, including Simon Roper (a Masters project evaluating the idea in 2016), and Psiren Kirk (an MBA project examining stakeholder relationships in 2022). We set up a formal trust with Bruce White as chair in June 2020. He did a lot of the work setting up the formalities, trust documentation, bank account, website that sort of thing. He resigned after about 18 months and then you (Eric Pawson) took over as chair for two years. A lot of effort was put into governance, that is getting good people in the right roles for the trust. We set up an advisory group alongside the trust, did a lot of planning, and now have a concept plan that identifies the stages of work that need to be done to get a fenced eco-sanctuary set up in the Burwood part of the red zone. We’ve focused on the Burwood area as the plan will have to be presented to the river corridor co-governance entity when it’s eventually set up. [A co-governance establishment committee came into being in 2022; as of July 2023, project proponents await its replacement by a permanent body able to make decisions about use of particular parcels of river corridor land.]. But that entity will only be responsible for the red zone areas, not Travis, as that sits outside the red zone. For that reason, the eco-sanctuary trust decided to leave the future of fencing at Travis with the Travis Wetland Trust.
What are your reflections on the positive and problematic aspects of your red zone involvements?
I acknowledge that I'm spread too thin and doing too many things. There was a view that all of the red zone would just become wetland and all we need to do is let the river flood everything and the (waterfowl) wildlife would ‘take off’. I had a sort of philosophically different perspective based on what I've been describing (the restoration concept) and about the bigger picture of where Canterbury and Christchurch fits in the conservation effort across the country. And the fact that the Burwood block we’ve been looking at for the sanctuary was actually filled land, and somewhat elevated above the surrounding floodplain. We should use that resource as it is and one of the things that we are missing in lowland Canterbury is native forest habitat. Christchurch had only two small fragments of native forests at the time of European settlement, but there was originally forest across the plains notwithstanding bits were in the outwash areas of the big braided rivers and periodically destroyed.
So I’ve been pushing to some extent against the narrative that Christchurch was ‘just a swamp’. And when you look at the soil types that underlie it, a lot of the area was potentially podocarp forest (comparable to Riccarton Bush/Putaringamotu). So my objective in promoting an eco-sanctuary on to that red zone land was to rebuild the forest habitat and therefore environment for bush birds and other wildlife. Sea level rise won’t affect it for several decades. The wider vision is to have large pockets, sanctuary pockets scattered through the country in representative environments. But there’s been quite a strong romantic notion that we've just got to let nature take its course and let the rivers flood out as wide as they can go. But the thing is, if you broaden the floodplains of the lower reaches of the main rivers coming through Christchurch you won't alleviate floods in the middle to upper catchment – as tidal water will push up and fill any space available. Flood protection will be determined by having holding ponds at the top of the catchments.
What's your view on the realisation of the sort of opportunities you'd like to see in the river corridor. Where do you think it’s going?
We’ve started to evolve the eco-sanctuary idea to look at having several nearby sanctuaries, smaller than the 200 hectares but totalling something similar to that which I've called a ‘constellation of sanctuaries’. The trust is currently focused on the Burwood red zone area but conceptually it's still linked to Travis and to the Bottle Lake Forest area, and the Horseshoe Lake area as potentially three large chunks that are within easy flying distance for wildlife. We can separate the slightly drier ground of the red zone, for example, from the wetter Travis and so incorporate different species of endangered wildlife, for example weka in the dry bits and takahe in the wetter bits without the potential interference of one by the other. There's always a danger that weka get quite aggressive and eat the takahe eggs. So there is value in separating those two species out from each other and developing ecosystems around their different habitat requirements.
The constellation builds on the notion of the ‘halo effect’ which is well represented by Zealandia in Wellington, where you have birds foraging out into surrounding unprotected habitat and and using not only fenced sanctuaries, but other habitats beyond that as stepping stones through the wider landscape. This could happen through the whole red zone corridor. There was a case recently in Wellington, where robins started to establish a breeding population outside the Zealandia sanctuary and then got wiped out by domestic cats. That graphically demonstrates the importance of those fenced sanctuaries to preserve those populations. But they can still fly from one sanctuary to another and forage out more widely. And the halos are ecological in the way I've just described, but also sociological in the sense that people who live in the matrix between these patches gain more familiarity with wildlife and it becomes something that you want to look after and protect.
The red zone planning process has been difficult for us to engage with, and one would have to say engagement by CERA and Toitū Te Whenua, with the initiative in the early days, was poor despite the community support we had. But there’s now an opportunity with the new red zone team at the Council and David Little, the red zone planner, to connect better with the planning process and integrate the vision for the sanctuary. And to make sure that competing uses are not going to undermine its viability because fundamentally the sanctuary areas with viable populations of wildlife in them need to be as big as they can be. So that's the conversation that I'm starting to build. I also think that people like those in the Council’s biodiversity team, Antony Shadbolt and Andrew Crossland, are coming round.
I give a lot of public lectures, about nature in the city, to groups like U3A and service clubs and I always get a pat on the back and everyone seems to love the eco-sanctuary idea. There’s no pushback in those situations. We haven't been entirely successful in harnessing that support, and leveraging it with the powers that be. But it has been driven by volunteers often spread too thin with all the other post-earthquake demands, and we’ve had to wait for a decision on proceeding from the yet-to-be formed co-governance entity. But I’d also like to say that this has never been a ‘winner takes all’ exercise but something complementary with other initiatives for eco-sanctuaries like on Banks Peninsula. It’s all part of building up a more robust indigenous nature across the whole city and the whole region – something largely neglected in Canterbury by comparison with most other regions of the Country. Our wildlife and our people have been missing out.
Interview with Eric Pawson, at Avebury House, 9 July 2024