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Ministerial Advisory Committee on Biodiversity and Private Land

The Ministerial Advisory Committee on Biodiversity and Private Land was appointed in early 1999 by the Minister for the Environment to look into ways to promote effective and sustainable management of biodiversity on private land.

Former Federated Farmers President and Landcare Chairman, John Kneebone chaired the Committee. Other members were Kevin Prime (farmer, forester and conservationist), Dr Judith Roper-Lindsay (ecologist) and Mark Christensen (lawyer).

The Committee started off by contacting a range of people with an interest in biodiversity or whose activities impacted upon biodiversity. The Committee commissioned a “stocktake” of biodiversity initiatives around the country. It then developed proposals for addressing the effects of private land management on indigenous biodiversity and drafted the preliminary report Bio-What?. A summary of submissions was published along with the Committee's final report in December 2000

Scope of the Committee’s work

The Committee took an effects based approach to meeting the biodiversity challenge, rather than defining the task in terms of physical boundaries. The report focused on the effects of land management on biodiversity wherever they occur. It covered only private land – that is the management of all land other than that held and managed by the Crown for conservation purposes (including the management of public land held predominantly for non-conservation purposes). Improving biodiversity management on Crown land (such as land administered by the Department of Conservation) is covered in the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy.

In the context of the Resource Management Act (RMA), the Committee’s work focused on ways to support and influence a subset of local authority functions. The main functions affected were regional councils’ land use and development control functions [section 30(1)(c), (e) and (f)] and district councils’ land use control functions (section 31). It also looked more widely at other matters that needed to be considered under the RMA to ensure effective biodiversity management.

Last updated: 11 January 2005