Mahi tokens launched in project to regrow native habitats

Landowners are being paid to return their land to native forests and wetlands, in a pilot project launched in Tairāwhiti on the East Coast.

To test the project launched on Tuesday, a Māori-owned beef station will be regenerated into native species, and proof of the work's success will be recorded using specially designed software.

Air New Zealand and the government's Māori development agency Te Puni Kōkiri are helping pay for the concept to be tried.

The concept was created by a start-up called the Toha Network, which was jointly founded by Givealittle founder Nathalie Whitaker, tech entrepreneur Mike Taitoko and scientist Shaun Hendy.

Toha's East Coast Establishment Director Renee Raroa is part of a Ngāti Porou family that manages a 930 hectare Māori land block on the far East Coast of the North Island, which she says is the perfect test bed for the nature-boosting project.

The owners of the Te Kautuku beef station want to restore indigenous ecosystems to most of the land, while keeping fewer beef cattle. But making money from restoring nature is difficult, Raroa said.

As well as beef pasture, the farm has beehives, a large protected area of original indigenous forest, and waterways flowing directly to the Pacific Ocean.

"The land block here at one point was a sheep and beef station, never hugely profitable, in fact unsustainable, so had transitioned to beef farming and some manuka honey," she said.

"But as those markets closed down, and became recognised as increasingly unsustainable from a climate perspective, we started looking at biodiversity markets."

The steep, erosion-prone land in the area has had a difficult history, both economically and environmentally.

After being developed into sheep farms, much of the land in Tairāwhiti was then planted in pine trees in the hope of preventing erosion after Cyclone Bola caused massive land slips in the 1980s.

Today it faces new problems, caused by slash from those pine plantations during yet more cyclones.

The pilot project should make the land more resilient to storms, as well as improving habitats for native species, Raroa said.

"We've identified six projects with our whānau... including reversion from stock farming into nature cover for a large proportion of the whenua, looking at threatened species [in the existing indigenous forest], waterway restoration, erosion control and establishment of a native nursery."

The programme funding the work uses digital tokens called MAHI.

Companies wanting to fund restoration of nature buy these tokens, and the people doing the work can access the money by uploading evidence of their efforts via a digital platform.

Toha's David Hall said if a company wants to claim - say in their annual report - that they are doing work to protect nature or slow climate change, the digital system helps them verify their claims and protect against allegations of greenwashing.

The system requires different kinds of evidence, depending on the work being done, but it could include satellite data, environmental DNA monitoring, or acoustic recordings of the environment, Dr Hall said.

"To receive that money, these front-line communities are collecting data."

"Companies have a growing requirement for [environmental] data," he said.

"Companies are already reporting on climate risk, and there's a growing expectation they will be reporting on nature related risks as well."

Raroa says it is not only shareholders who are interested in proof that companies are restoring the ecosystems they work in.

She gives the example of the honey company that is marketing honey from Te Kautuku overseas, which uses the fact that is has funded regenerating native trees on the farm as a selling point to its customers.

If the pilot goes well, the people at Toha hope the platform will be used by indigenous landowners in other parts of Tairāwhiti, New Zealand and the world.

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