Nature and Biodiversity Action & Investment Plan

Together we can value, protect and enhance our natural environment. To achieve this, we have developed a Nature and Biodiversity Action and Investment Plan.

This AIP has now been adopted at the Council meeting on 21 August 2023.

Thank you to everyone who has provide time and feedback on preparing this plan.

Please note that our action and investment plans are roadmaps for how we can achieve Our Direction, but we cannot fund all of them all at once. Most of the “priority actions” within each plan have are currently included in our working draft Long-term Plan 2024-2034 (as at July 2023), and this is clearly shown in the action tables within each plan. When the Long-term Plan is finalised next year, we will go back and update the actions in these plans to reflect final Long-term Plan funding decisions.

For reference, here is the earlier draft AIP that went out for feedback in May 2023

Nature and Biodiversity AIP - working draft v3 - 10 May  2023 (1.4mb pdf)

The Nature and Biodiversity AIP helps to deliver on our city vision and the Tauranga Taurikura 2022-2032 draft Environment Strategy. This plan focuses on the Tauranga Taurikura goal to have: Thriving nature and biodiversity at the heart of our communities.

We live in a beautiful city with many opportunities to explore nature in our own backyard. Sadly, that backyard is under pressure, with only 3% of land cover remaining in native vegetation.

We know that looking after our natural environment is important to our communities, and we’re listening.

We want to harness the love of nature within our community and turn it into action, where people are positively engaged with the natural environment and working together to celebrate, protect and enhance our natural environment.

We’re working with our mana whenua partners and others to seek new and innovative ways to take action to protect and enhance our natural environment including:

• Incorporating more tree planting in our designs for roads, stormwater and public areas.
• Protecting mature and maturing trees.
• Undertaking pest management on council land.
• Enhancing how we look after areas in our city that are recognised as being special ecological areas and Significant Natural Areas.
• Looking to international best practice to ensure we are enabling nature to flourish throughout the city, including having healthy, diverse, connected and accessible greenspace.