Co-creating carbon removal with Indigenous communities

Professor John Reid, of the University of Canterbury’s Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, is a sustainability science expert with a strong interest in Indigenous economies.

Professor John Reid believes Aotearoa New Zealand’s Indigenous Māori will embrace the opportunity presented by new carbon removal tech to achieve environmental and economic goals. Part of the five-year Government-funded Carbon Removal Project, he is developing a co-designed case study with an Indigenous organisation.

How has climate change influenced your life and career?

I became aware of climate change and its seriousness about 1992 or ‘93, when studying forestry here at the University of Canterbury. It helped propel me in my current direction: attempting to address multiple issues in a systemic way by transforming the way we manage land and water resources.

If you can reduce emissions and encourage carbon sequestration, say through native planting, then typically you’re not only dealing with climate change but you’re usually promoting biodiversity.

Are Māori entities leading climate innovations in New Zealand?

Absolutely. Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu is already carbon-neutral, with the overall emissions from its commercial activities balanced out by its forestry. But it’s also exploring new technologies, and has developed a regenerative farming programme - a $11 million investment with the Government - to see if they can make the farms themselves carbon-neutral.

That’s driven by an environmental ethos and values system, a desire to enhance the mauri, that is the life-supporting capacity or vitality, of the environment. Māori see our rivers and our land as family relations, cousins or kin. We have an obligation to maintain or enhance their mana, their dignity, in response to environmental harm. That folds through into the strategies of Māori businesses and institutions.

There’s a lot of thinking about future generations. So when it comes to adaptation, Māori entities can be the most progressive.

But interestingly, Māori entities are some of the highest, if not the highest, performing companies in New Zealand – despite all these self-imposed environmental constraints on their commercial operations.

In your mind, how does carbon removal technology fit within te ao Māori, the Indigenous worldview?

Our tikanga, roughly translated as our way of being or culture, encourages an adaptative approach.

Māori are generally quite pragmatic. Ideally, you wouldn’t have to be storing carbon dioxide through these technologies underground, or in soils, or in the sea. But there’s a general recognition that we have to act, that this is a climate emergency.

Our worldview also focuses on interconnections: understanding broad, deeper, long-term relationships. So Māori will be interested in the cascading, systemic impacts of the implementation of these technologies – by focusing on one area, is this going to create a cascading issue in another area?

Finally, carbon removal is a commercial opportunity. Many Māori have been disenfranchised economically due to a history of colonialism. But Māori organisations could be in a strong economic position, by being at the forefront of the development of these technologies. This could flow into communities and address economic disparity.

By working with our Māori research partners, we aim to broaden our understanding, boost education and buy-in, and better develop these new technologies to alleviate concerns. We will build a robust process through which technologies can be deployed in future.

Māori businesses are pioneers in regenerative farming techniques, including a multi-million-dollar research project with the New Zealand Government.

What would project success look like to you?

I hope we’ll have proven the feasibility of these technologies: not just technically, but also financially, culturally and socially. It would be great to have a range of Māori organisations interested and seriously considering investing in these technologies – seeing this as an opportunity for them to lead the emerging carbon removal industry.

Across your career, what do you draw inspiration from?

People on the ground – the ones working everyday restoring estuaries, lagoons, wetlands and forest areas. They’re pushing at the edges of innovation, by drawing on their cultural resources and ancestral wisdom.

There’s an orthodoxy that refuses to shift and change – or recognise the real challenges we’re faced with on a number of fronts: environmental, social. There’s a lot of incentives to do what we already know how to do. So I really admire people who push against that, while attempting to bring everyone along.