Campaigns

Forest & Bird has an ambitious three-year plan to restore vanishing species, mitigate the climate crisis, improve the health of our rivers, and properly protect our oceans.

Sea lions once lived around the entire coastline of New Zealand, but hunting nearly killed them all. Now, they mostly breed on the remote Subantarctic Auckland Islands.

Our countryside has been transformed in the last few decades, as colourful and diverse drylands turn into the monotonous green pastures.

This transformation has only been made possible by irrigation.

For too long, nature has been treated as a raw input for economic growth, or a dumping ground for waste. As a result, nature has reached breaking point.

In New Zealand, it’s illegal to kill protected animals - unless you’re a commercial fisher.

Due to its long geological isolation since breaking away from the supercontinent Gondwana about 80 million years ago, New Zealand’s plants and animals have developed down a unique evolutionary path.

Using the Resource Management Act, Forest & Bird has saved many precious environments, and created powerful precedents for environmental protection.

The Hauraki Gulf is an incredible place, globally recognised for the diversity of its wildlife, including whales, dolphins, and seabirds.

In Northland, many great native forests and their wildlife are collapsing.

In 2016, the East Coast of Marlborough, a long isolated haven for a multitude of wild and threatened species, was uplifted in the Kaikōura earthquake by 2.5 metres. Marine life perished and intertidal areas changed dramatically.  Rock pools and beaches

Penguins are incredible birds, and New Zealand is home to one-third of the world’s penguin species.

An open-cast mine on Te Kuha would destroy a unique ecosystem that is home to a range of threatened species. 

Marine reserves are the ocean equivalent of national parks and mean marine life can breed and regenerate with less disruption from humans.

Over hundreds of millions of years, decayed plants and animals have been transformed into deposits of oil, coal, and natural gas lying under New Zealand’s land and sea, locking away huge amounts of carbon.

Seabed mining off the coast of Taranaki could destroy an area roughly three times the size of Rangitoto Island and threaten a unique ocean environment. 

In forgotten corners of New Zealand, nature is disappearing. Government agencies are failing to protect nature on public land.

The Mackenzie Basin and its natural tussock drylands and the biodiversity it supports are under threat.

New research shows plastic makes up 78 percent of waste on New Zealand beaches.

Our seabirds are particularly vulnerable to plastic pollution: global research has found rubbish is being fed to chicks by their parents and it is killing them.

Imagine an Aotearoa free of introduced predators, where urban areas are filled with native birds, lizards, insects, and plants. 

Kauri dieback disease is caused by a microscopic spore that attacks the roots and trunk of kauri trees, damaging the tissue that carries nutrients, and causing them to starve.

New Zealand has a long history of keeping our most spectacular landscapes open for all to enjoy – right from the creation of Tongariro National Park, the first national park in the world gifted by indigenous people. 

More than 74 percent of our freshwater fish species are in threatened or at risk of extinction. We need to bring back native fish to the streams where they were once found.

Our conservation land is often the last refuge for many native species that are in serious trouble.

Ninety percent of New Zealand’s original wetlands have been destroyed by agricultural and urban development – and are still disappearing.