Rising sea temperatures in New Zealand are threatening a food source that Maori have depended on for generations.Maori

D.Annie Parul is crouching by the water, waiting for her hands to get wet. Behind him, in the distant hills, sharp peaks mark where the lands of his tribe, Te Wakatohea, stretched out before they were forcibly occupied by the Crown. In front of him, the water surface of the estuary is rippling.

“Years ago, our Kauma Tua [elders] They realized that we were considered landless people, that there was not much land left after the land was confiscated. So they turned to the sea,” he says. “The places around this area have provided us with food and survival for generations.”

The sea is changing now. Along this coastline, tribes still dig for pipi, native bivalves, walking waist-deep and digging their fingers into the soft mud-sand. But other food sources, such as cockles and mussels, are shrinking or disappearing. Estuaries and tidal flats are being altered and reshaped by new currents, sea level rise and farm runoff.

The scent of Phi Phi Bed is also changing. “That smell I remembered as a child is gone,” Parul says – hard to explain, but the dark, rich, salty-like smell of mud is gone, replaced by a light, sandy, salty smell. disappeared. .

When the climate heats the surrounding sea water, new zealandMaori tribes have documented subtle and dramatic changes to their lands and oceans, with some losing food-gathering practices that have sustained their communities for hundreds of years. With the speed and severity of change increasing, tribes are scrambling to find solutions to preserve the marine environments they depend on and to pass on their precious species to future generations.

“No whales”

New Zealand bore a series of burdens record ocean heatwave Extreme changes in water temperature have caused average temperatures to rise by more than 4°C in the last 12 months in some areas. Warmer temperatures will redistribute marine species, move warm-water fish increasingly southward, change migration patterns of whales, and possibly cause mass mortality, including sponges, shellfish, penguins, salmon and other fish species. contributed to

As the temperature rises, the carbon dioxide concentration in the water increases the acidification of the oceans, destroying shellfish, reducing the size of organisms, and deteriorating their health. Te Wakatojea’s ancestral land is in the Bay of Plenty region, where the sea has been in a heatwave for over a year now.

“every day Maori Communities across the country that still stay connected to Moana [ocean] You will notice a change,” says Mele Takoko, Aotearoa Country Leader for Conservation International.

“In Kaikoura in the south, we have been without whales for months. This has never happened before…it shows what is happening in our oceans.”

Decrease in fish resources

At the bend of the slow-flowing Arafura River, generations of gaitufu fishermen have hauled their nets and stepped into the still-cold spring waters. They come for whitebait, or enanga (small native fish that swim up rivers to spawn). Once caught in cloth or sugar sack weaves, they are now caught in fine mesh nets and fried whole in fritters, a delicacy in New Zealand.

“My father told me that when he was a kid, he used to catch buckets of water that he would throw back into the river because he caught so much.” Kaiwakahaele’s Lisa Tumahay says [chairperson] of Te Runanga O Guy Tough. “My husband told me about growing up in a village when he was a child and using manure to fertilize the garden. We had cousins ​​who caught enough fish to feed themselves.”

“It doesn’t exist anymore,” she says. The Gaitahu still fish for whitebait, but their numbers have dwindled dramatically due to overfishing, sedimentation, runoff from farming, increased drought, and now changing temperatures. Whitebait is one of the most vulnerable species to the impacts of the climate crisis, according to a climate change vulnerability assessment conducted by Niwa, New Zealand’s national climate researcher.

“We are still a very active hunter-gatherer tribe,” says Tumahay. “If you can’t harvest Mahinga Kai, you can’t sustain yourself. You can’t bring food to the table.”

For Maori Mahinga Kai, Collecting traditional foods is not only a practical and economic practice that is essential in the process of welcoming visitors to the marae and maintaining a connection with the environment, ancestors and traditional systems of knowledge. It is considered an important cultural practice.

“Kai [food] It’s a central part of life, our happiness, everything,” Parul says. “It is therefore our responsibility to ensure that what we leave behind for future generations is protected.”

“This problem is not ours”

Ngai Tahu Hapu, a small fishing village in Moeraki on the east coast of the South Island [subtribes] They watch the weather patterns change and the coastlines begin to crumble.

“When an easterly wind was forecast, we knew the wind would gradually pick up along the coast during the day, so we used to go fishing,” says David Higgins of Upoko. [leader] of Te Runanga O Moeraki. “Now the wind is much more erratic than it used to be, so it seems to happen within an hour. It’s dangerous to go fishing when high winds are expected.”

Higgins says he has seen the food system change rapidly in his lifetime.Tuna [native eels] You can feel the salt invading the intertidal zone and it is now moving out to sea faster than before.Kina [sea urchins] It’s small and the quantity is small.

“Many of us who live far from our villages will be shocked by the changing coastlines and how our traditional mahingakai practices will have to adapt to climate change,” he said. he says

Gaitahu has a vast corporate sector of the tribe involved in fishing, tourism, agriculture and transportation. Today, the tribe has launched a vast plan to push its business operations to net zero carbon emissions. Replace jet boat fleets with electric, long-haul trucks with hydrogen, and start piloting regenerative agriculture on farms.

“We have a proverb that gives direction to all our decisions: Whakatauki. Mo Tatu, Ah, Mo Ka Uri, Ah Muri Ake Nei: Our decisions are for today’s generations, tomorrow’s generations and future generations who are not yet born,” said Tumahay.

“For us, indigenous people We are from a small country so it didn’t cause this confusion. We didn’t create this problem, but we will be unduly affected by it. “

For Wakathair, the central focus so far is the kuku, green-lipped mussels that the iwi consider taonga. [cultural treasure]. Across the country, mussels have proven to be very vulnerable to heat waves. Because it is anchored to rocks, water and sunlight are too hot for it to survive. In 2020, hundreds of thousands of mussels Burned to death on a beach in New Zealand during a heat wave.

The changes brought about by climate change “are at risk that we can’t go out and eat mussels right away, and our connection with mussels is at risk,” said a Whakato Hair scientist participating in the Moana Project. Dr. Kimberly Maxwell says: The New Zealand government investigates sea temperature changes and their effects.

The rocky areas around the harbor have almost wiped out mussels, so the tribe has invested heavily in offshore mussel farms over the past decade. This is because the deeper the sea, the less likely the water temperature rises. The tribe hopes to continue expanding it over thousands of hectares of open ocean over time.

Mussels also play an important role in the environment, according to Maxwell, as they filter water and their shells help sequester carbon. “Trying to stay connected is really important because connection is part of our identity,” she says.

Conservation International’s Takoko says Māori’s connection to the sea is “part of the cultural fabric”.

“Indigenous peoples had a very strong affinity with the beautiful sea – we Whakapapa [hold genealogical links]we consider ourselves relatives of these taonga species,” she says.

“Much of our cultural knowledge is contained around these species, so losing these taongas is actually losing part of our culture.”