What's at risk
Show or hide parcels by their legal designation.
About this map
Aotearoa's conservation land at risk
About a third of Aotearoa New Zealand — roughly 8.5 million hectares — is public conservation land: mountains, forests, rivers, wetlands and coast held in common for everyone, and a drawcard that DOC estimates adds around NZ$3.4 billion a year in tourism value (2019/20–2022/23 average). The Conservation Amendment Bill would give the Department of Conservation a new economic-development role across all of it, and make much of it far easier to sell or swap. This map shows the scale of what's at stake.
GLOBAÏA reads this through a wider lens. Land that stores carbon, holds freshwater and shelters living habitat does work that keeps the whole planet liveable — part of what Earth-system scientists call the planetary commons: critical Earth-regulating systems held in the common interest of all humanity, present and future, wherever they happen to lie within national borders (Rockström et al., PNAS 2024). Seen that way, this isn't only a question of New Zealand's property — it's about whether a piece of that commons is put up for sale.
Reading the map
- Red — can be sold or exchanged. Conservation land that could go through the Bill's weakened test for exchange or disposal, and also be opened to commercial activity. More than half the conservation estate by area.
- Orange — open to commercial use. Land protected from sale or exchange (national parks, wilderness, ecological and nature reserves and the like), but still opened to new commercial activity.
- Glowing points mark a handful of well-loved places named as examples. Tap any of them — or any coloured area — for detail.
- Magenta — Conservation Imperatives. An optional overlay (Display → Overlays) marking about 35 sites where rare and endemic species are most concentrated — where protecting habitat matters most. Tap one for detail.
- Red-to-green — threatened environments. An optional overlay (Display → Overlays) shading the whole country, not just conservation land, by how much of each environment's original native vegetation survives and how well it is protected — from acutely threatened to least reduced and best protected.
The coloured layer sits over live satellite imagery, deliberately semi-transparent so you can see the actual forests, ranges and coastlines underneath. Adjust the overlay strength, filter by land type, or switch between the high-resolution and Sentinel-2 satellite basemaps under Display.
Display → Overlays adds Conservation Imperatives — about 35 New Zealand sites identified by Dinerstein et al. (2024) where rare and endemic species are so concentrated that their survival depends on protecting these exact patches of habitat — showing where saving land matters most, alongside the estate this Bill could open up.
The same menu adds Threatened environments — the official Threatened Environments Classification 2012 from Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research. It grades every part of Aotearoa by two things at once: how much of the original native vegetation that once covered that kind of country still remains nationally, and how much of what survives is legally protected. The lowlands that have been most cleared and least protected glow red (acutely threatened); the high country and large intact forests, still mostly indigenous, read green. Laid beneath the conservation estate, it shows how much of what is left of our rarest environments sits on the very land this Bill could open up.
What the Bill changes
The heart of it is a new function for the Department of Conservation — section 6(ea) — to "recognise the economic opportunities that arise from the use and development" of the land DOC manages and to enable that use and development "to the greatest extent practicable". That function applies to 100% of the estate. Unlike the recreation function beside it — which the Bill expressly limits to "the extent consistent with" conservation — the new economic mandate carries no such qualifier, so legal commentators argue economic development could be weighed against, and potentially prioritised over, conservation. The Minister has called the package the most significant reform of conservation law in nearly 40 years.
On top of that, the Bill makes land far easier to sell or swap. Today only stewardship land can be disposed of, and only if it has little or no conservation value (Conservation Act 1987, s 26). The Bill widens the categories and weakens the test (new s 15K): ministers would only have to keep land that is important for threatened species or ecosystems, or that is one of the best examples of its type in its ecological district — though a disposal still cannot proceed if the Director-General recommends against it. That leaves about 60% of the estate eligible — a scale the Bill's own explanatory note confirms, noting roughly 40% of the highest-value land stays ineligible — including places with high conservation value. A new "net conservation benefit" exchange (new s 15C) lets land be swapped wherever the incoming land's resources are assessed as greater than the outgoing land's, and need not be like-for-like — which critics warn could see remote wild habitat traded away.
How it could become law
The Bill was introduced on 7 May 2026 and passed its first reading on 12 May, 68 votes to 54 (the National–ACT–NZ First coalition in favour; Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori against). It is now before the environment select committee, which is taking public submissions until 11:59 pm on 2 July 2026 before reporting back (nominally November 2026), ahead of further readings and Royal Assent.
What about Te Tiriti o Waitangi?
For many Māori, conservation is bound up with kaitiakitanga — guardianship of the natural world. The Conservation Act's Treaty clause (section 4), which requires the Act to be administered so as to give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti, is not deleted. A new section 4A would set out the specific steps the Crown must take before land decisions — which the Government calls added "clarity and certainty," and critics say would in effect narrow the duty. Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu's Kaiwhakahaere, Justin Tipa, said the Bill shows "upholding Treaty Settlements has been treated as a complete afterthought" and would "significantly diminish" section 4; Te Pāti Māori separately condemned it as a breach of good faith toward iwi.
How the classification works
The polygons are the official DOC Public Conservation Land layer (11,026 parcels). Each is coloured by its legal designation: the categories that the Bill's new Schedule 5 (Land ineligible for exchange or disposal, inserted into the Conservation Act 1987) exempts from sale or exchange — national parks, wilderness areas, ecological and sanctuary areas, nature and scientific reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, and the two island scenic reserves the Bill names (Kaikoura Island and Rakitu Island) — are drawn orange; every other category is drawn red. This split is our reading of Bill 309 and may differ from Forest & Bird's in edge cases: Schedule 5 also exempts national reserves, marine reserves and Ramsar wetlands, which aren't cleanly separable in the DOC layer, and we draw the broad categories rather than parcel-by-parcel legal tests.
Full methodology — data, classification & the Bill
1 · Source data
The polygons are the official DOC Public Conservation Land (PCL) layer — an extract of NaPALIS, the Department of Conservation's (DOC) National Property and Land Information System. The version mapped here holds 11,026 polygons, was last updated 2026-06-17, and is supplied in the New Zealand national grid NZTM (New Zealand Transverse Mercator, EPSG:2193 / NZGD2000). Each polygon carries attributes including Type (coarse class), Legislatio (governing Act), Name, and — the one that drives every colour here — Section, the precise legal designation of the parcel (for example S4_NATIONAL_PARK, S25_STEWARDSHIP_AREA, S19_1_A_SCENIC_RESERVE). Source: DOC Public Conservation Land (CC BY 4.0).
2 · How each polygon gets its colour
Colour is decided entirely by the Section attribute. We treat the following designations as orange — protected from sale or exchange under the Bill's new Schedule 5 (see §3) but still exposed to new commercial use:
- S4_NATIONAL_PARK — national parks
- 20_WILDERNESS_AREA — wilderness areas
- S21_ECOLOGICAL_AREA — ecological areas
- S22_SANCTUARY_AREA — sanctuary areas
- S20_NATURE_RESERVE — nature reserves
- S21_SCIENTIFIC_RESERVE — scientific reserves
- S14A_WILDLIFE_MANAGEMENT_RESERVE — Wildlife Act sanctuary-type reserves
Every other Section is drawn red — stewardship areas, conservation parks, conservation-purpose land, amenity areas, wildlife management areas, scenic / recreation / historic / local-purpose / government-purpose reserves, marginal strips, and Waitangi endowment forest. Two safeguards apply on top of the rule. First, any Section value the rule does not recognise is given a fail-safe red (we count unclassified land as exposed rather than silently dropping it). Second, a by-name override flips the two island scenic reserves the Bill protects — Rakitu Island Scenic Reserve and Kaikoura Island Scenic Reserve — from red to orange (only Rakitu is present in this extract; Kaikoura is kept in the override so it is handled if it appears in a future extract). By legal designation alone this is 10,804 red / 222 orange polygons; applying the Rakitu override flips that one scenic-reserve parcel, so the map as drawn shows 10,803 red / 223 orange. Red covers about 55.5% of the total area (≈ 38,645 of 69,629 km²), consistent with Forest & Bird's "up to ~60%" headline.
3 · The legal basis in the Bill
The Conservation Amendment Bill (Bill 309) amends the Conservation Act 1987 (the "principal Act"). Three of its changes define the two colours:
The economic-development function (everything → at least orange). Clause 6 replaces section 6(e) of the Conservation Act with a new section 6(ea), giving the Department a function "to recognise the economic opportunities that arise from the use and development of land and other natural resources and historic resources managed by the Department, and to enable this use and development to the greatest extent practicable under this Act and other enactments." This function attaches to all land the Department manages, so every polygon on the map is at least orange.
The widened exchange / disposal regime (→ red). A new Part 3C (new sections 15 to 15ZB) replaces the old land-transfer rules and applies to land held under the Conservation Act 1987, the Reserves Act 1977 and the Wildlife Act 1953 (new s15). Subpart 2 prohibits disposals "except under this subpart" (new s15J) and then, in new section 15K, lets the Minister dispose of (sell) land provided it "is not important for the conservation of threatened species or threatened ecosystems" and is "not the best, or one of the best, examples" of its indigenous vegetation or fauna habitat in its ecological district — and provided none of the prohibitions in s15K(2) apply. Subpart 1's new section 15A lets the Minister authorise a land exchange, but "only if a net conservation benefit will result" — defined (new s15C(3)) as the incoming land's natural and historic resources being assessed as greater than the outgoing land's. Today, by contrast, only stewardship areas can be straightforwardly disposed of, under the existing section 26 — which Bill 309 repeals (clause 25). Land that is eligible for this weakened exchange/disposal test is what we colour red.
Schedule 5 — the exemptions (→ orange). The Bill inserts a new Schedule 5 into the Conservation Act 1987 (via the Bill's own Schedule 3, clause 47), titled "Land ineligible for exchange or disposal." Its clauses are the hook for both s15A(2)(a) and s15K(2)(a) — land in Schedule 5 may not be exchanged or sold. The schedule lists:
- cl 1 — wilderness, ecological and sanctuary areas (declared under s18AA / s18(1)) → our 20_WILDERNESS_AREA, S21_ECOLOGICAL_AREA, S22_SANCTUARY_AREA
- cl 2 — national parks → S4_NATIONAL_PARK
- cl 3 — national reserves (Reserves Act s13) → not separable in this layer
- cl 4 — nature reserves (Reserves Act s20) → S20_NATURE_RESERVE
- cl 5 — scientific reserves (Reserves Act s21) → S21_SCIENTIFIC_RESERVE
- cl 6 — reserve land set apart as wilderness (Reserves Act s47(1))
- cl 7 — marine reserves (Marine Reserves Act s4(1)) → not in this terrestrial layer
- cl 8 — two named scenic reserves: Kaikoura Island Scenic Reserve and Rakitu Island Scenic Reserve → our by-name override
- cl 9 — wildlife sanctuaries (Wildlife Act s9(1)) → S14A_WILDLIFE_MANAGEMENT_RESERVE (closest match in this layer)
- cl 10 — Ramsar-notified wetlands → not separable in this layer
- cl 11–13 — the Otahu Dedicated Area, the Parakawai Geological Area, and certain northern offshore-island land held since 1991
So the map encodes a precise distinction: orange = exempt from sale or exchange under Schedule 5 but still opened to commercial use by new s6(ea); red = both eligible for the weakened exchange/disposal test and opened to commercial use.
4 · Geometry processing
The full-precision NZTM polygons are reprojected to WGS84 (EPSG:4326, the web-map standard) with
no vertex simplification — coordinates are rounded to 7 decimal places
(≈ 1 cm), which rounds values without dropping any vertices, so a parcel keeps its true
shape at every zoom. Before tiling, the geometry is repaired with GDAL's
-makevalid: the DOC export ships many polygons with broken ring
winding or self-intersections (344 features in all, including 12 of the 14 national parks).
This matters because MapLibre (the WebGL map renderer) fills polygons by ring
winding order — an invalid polygon simply does not fill its interior and renders as a hole at
higher zooms, which is what originally made Taranaki/Egmont National Park invisible. The
repaired polygons are baked into a single PMTiles archive (a cloud-optimised
vector-tile container) with tippecanoe, using
--no-line-simplification, --no-tiny-polygon-reduction,
--no-tile-size-limit and --no-feature-limit and no feature
dropping — this is a choropleth, not a density map, so every polygon must survive at
every zoom. PMTiles is served by HTTP range request, so the larger file does not mean larger
downloads for visitors.
5 · Caveats & honesty
This red/orange split is GLOBAÏA's reading of Bill 309 and may differ from Forest & Bird's in edge cases. We count marginal strips (the S24_* riverbank and coastal strips) as red, because they are not named in Schedule 5; a stricter reading would flip them to orange, which moves the red share roughly 55 → 56%. Several Schedule 5 categories — national reserves (cl 3), marine reserves (cl 7) and Ramsar wetlands (cl 10) — are not cleanly separable in this terrestrial DOC layer and are therefore approximated or excluded rather than carved out exactly. And the classification is by broad legal designation, not a parcel-by-parcel legal test of whether a specific piece of land would in practice pass or fail the s15K disposal thresholds. The polygons are official; the colours are our interpretation.
You can have a say
Public submissions are open to anyone — individuals, iwi, businesses and experts — and take only a few minutes. Submissions go to the environment select committee via the New Zealand Parliament; Forest & Bird offers guidance to help you write one. Submissions close 11:59 pm on 2 July 2026. (A related National Conservation Policy Statement is being consulted on separately, closing 10 August 2026 — extended from an original 9 July.)
Sources
- Polygons: DOC Public Conservation Land (NaPALIS extract), Department of Conservation — CC BY 4.0.
- Legislation: Conservation Amendment Bill (Bill 309).
- Campaign & the original maps that inspired this: Forest & Bird; mapped overview at RNZ.
- Legal analysis of the Bill: Anderson Lloyd and the Resource Management Law Association.
- Tourism value (~NZ$3.4 billion, 2019/20–2022/23 average): Department of Conservation.
- Te Tiriti / Ngāi Tahu response: Te Ao Māori News.
- Planetary-commons framing: Rockström et al., "The planetary commons: A new paradigm for safeguarding Earth-regulating systems in the Anthropocene," PNAS 121(5), 2024.
- Conservation Imperatives overlay: Dinerstein et al., "Conservation Imperatives: securing the last unprotected terrestrial sites harboring irreplaceable biodiversity," Frontiers in Science, 2024 (SpeciesRarityER2023, New Zealand subset).
- Threatened environments overlay: Threatened Environments Classification 2012 (LRIS layer 48282), Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research — CC BY 3.0 NZ. Method: Cieraad, Walker, Price & Barringer (2015), "An updated assessment of indigenous cover remaining and legal protection in New Zealand's land environments," NZ Journal of Ecology 39(2); building on Walker et al. (2006), NZ Journal of Ecology 30(2): 169–177, and the Land Environments of New Zealand (Leathwick et al. 2003). Reclassified from LENZ level-IV environments to the six threat classes via the published TEC 2012 lookup table.
- Satellite imagery: Esri World Imagery (Maxar, Earthstar Geographics); Sentinel-2 basemap Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX (Copernicus).
A GLOBAÏA visualization · globaia.org. This is an independent reproduction and interpretation — not official Department of Conservation or Forest & Bird output. The polygons are official open data; the red/orange classification is GLOBAÏA's reading of Bill 309.