The Law of Ecosystem Restoration for Community Conservation Groups

Abstract

Across New Zealand communities have identified the need to restore and rehabilitate damaged ecosystems in their locality. However, community conservation groups (CCGs) often face significant obstacles when undertaking activities to restore and rehabilitate ecosystems. Activities carried out by CCGs require the people managing them to have an understanding of a plethora of different regulatory and legislative instruments, such as regional and district plans, corporate law, health and safety legislation, and employment law. The land use regulation that applies to a particular restoration site also has the potential to significantly affect how effective a CCG can be by either restraining the impacts on the land by neighbouring land use practices that impact negatively on the site, or by creating a legal environment that facilitates legal protection for significant conservation areas and prevents development. All of these factors, and a large number of others, require CCG to have an understanding of the law.

Many of the issues that CCGs face have not been dealt with adequately in legal writing in the past and are not well understood. Therefore further research and writing is necessary is this area to help CCGs undertake their work with minimal legal obstacles. To help address this gap this research paper will evaluate some of the main legal issues faced by CCGs and determine how these issues can be resolved by answering the question: What are the main legal barriers faced by Community Conservation Groups (CCGs) when undertaking ecosystem restoration projects and how can these barriers be removed effectively? To answer this question the two main methods of research that have been used are literature analysis and review, and semi-structured interviews with a range of CCGs and other organisations involved in ecosystem restoration. There are two main topics covered in this paper. Firstly, corporate issues for CCGs and secondly, land management issues for CCGs.