Our wellbeing as New Zealanders depends critically on the health of our natural ecosystems and the services these provide. They underpin much of our economy – agriculture, seafood, tourism, forestry and renewable energy to power our homes and businesses – but our quality of life is also integrally linked to our outdoor experiences – taking the family to the beach, hunting and fishing, swimming in a river on a hot day.

Sustainability requires robust institutional frameworks and policies to underpin resilient production systems and communities.

Environmental valuation

Increasingly, communities have to decide how to allocate resources between competing uses – an issue at the very heart of sustainable development.

Cawthron has leading expertise in evaluating the social, economic and cultural values that people derive from environmental resources. We bring a unique mix of ecology, economics and social psychology to exploring the complex interactions between people and the environment, to help decision-makers and their communities allocate resources sustainably.

Policy and risk analysis

Environmental policy options rarely have certain outcomes, because the natural environment is anything but predictable even before considering people. Stakeholders tend to perceive the risk of various outcomes differently, leading to conflict over policy options. Biosecurity – managing the risk of invasive species – is a case in point, and Cawthron is undertaking research to better understand attitudes to risk and how to account for these in biosecurity policy. This will have applications across a range of resource management policy issues.

Our policy experience includes freshwater management, biosecurity, emissions trading and climate change policy, as well as coastal and fisheries management (see below).

We have initiated a project with the University of Otago to help Maori present their values in RMA processes, an outcome that should assist applicants and decision-makers as well as Maori themselves. This work is funded by the Foundation for Research Science and Technology (FRST).

Sustainable marine resources & governance

Fisheries & coastal management is another area where we offer a combination of policy expertise, economics and modelling skills. We can assist with commercial stock assessment, collecting and analyzing fine-scale catch data, management of recreational fisheries, and spatial allocation for marine farming. We are using our expertise in coastal ecology and modelling to develop new tools for eco-system based management. And we have social science and facilitation capability to help make collaborative governance a reality.