Marine Protected Areas (MPA)

UPDATE - January 2006

The Marine protected area’s policy and implantation plan was released by the Department of Conservation and the Ministry of Fisheries in January 2006 to find out more go to the biodiversity website (link to external website).

UPDATE - April 2005

Marine Protected Areas Policy Statement and Implementation Plan
 
On 8 November 2004 the Ministry of Fisheries and the Department of Conservation(DoC) released the Marine Protected Areas (MPA) Policy Statement and Implementation Plan(MPAPSIP) for consultation. A copy of the MPAPSIP (link to external website) is attached. The development of this strategy is a key action under the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy:

"Develop and implement a strategy for establishing a network of areas that protect marine biodiversity, including marine reserves, world heritage sites, and other coastal and marine management tools such as mataitai and taiapure areas, marine area closures, seasonal closures and area closures to certain fishing methods." (action 3.6 A)

The consultation material was mailed to national stakeholder organisations and iwi, as well as being made available on agency and biodiversity websites. A national stakeholder meeting was held in December to discuss the consultation material. MFish and DoC responded to requests received from a small number of iwi for meetings, and also met with other groups, including the NZ Conservation Authority and regional coastal planners (see meetings list). Annex One provides information on the groups met with. Submissions on the consultation document closed on 28 February 2005.

68 submissions have been received. To highlight the key issues raised by the submitters an independent summary of submissions has been produced.

Submitters were generally supportive of the idea of taking a more strategic, robust, co-ordinated and inclusive approach to marine biodiversity protection. However, submitters also raised a number of concerns with both the consultation material and the MPAPSIP itself. Some of these issues are substantive in nature and will require further discussion and development of some components of the MPAPSIP.

Please see:

  Independent summary of submissions (119 KB)

MPAPIP meetings list

Next Steps

Officials will provide a revised version of the MPAPSIP by 17 May 2005, together with a revised implementation plan, for Ministers to consider. Stakeholders should note that the implementation plan will include details of the processes to be used to confirm;

Officials also intend to prepare a response to submissions that can be communicated to those who made submissions, together with the submission summary.