The Environmental Defence Society is pushing for clearer national policies for addressing the impact of development on nature, including for biodiversity offsets.
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Under the Resource Management Act, adverse effects of development must be avoided, remedied or mitigated.
Those actions can include making so-called biodiversity offsets, an example of which was the attempted relocation of about 6,000 endangered snails and their habitat, from a mining site on the West Coast in 2011.
However 800 snails were frozen by accident before they could be relocated.
The Environmental Defence Society's senior policy analyst, Marie Brown, said there needed to be stronger policies with less ambiguous language in place to protect biodiversity.
"Any planner will tell you if you ask for nothing you will get it, and that's the situation we have here in New Zealand with a lack of a really robust policy around this."
Ms Brown said there needed to be more incentives for New Zealanders to protect biodiversity.
"If we can make conservation a sensible thing to do for anyone who has biodiversity on their land, you might find a lot of biodiversity that would have been in the firing line is thus protected."