Nona Pelletier, Senior

The bountiful hauls of kaimoana integral to East Cape iwi have long been the envy of those inland.

When manuhiri would arrive from across the motu they’d be treated to hākari (feasts) of kina, kōura (crayfish), kākahi (mussels), pāua, kahawai – the list goes on.

“That was the expectation,” says Ora Barlow-Tukaki, of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui.

“To be able to do that was a source of mana, or pride, for the hapū of the coast.”

While overfishing has impacted a lot of this tīkanga – custom – climate change threatens to eliminate it.

Shellfish are particularly vulnerable, largely immobile and unable to simply move habitat as the waters warmed and became more acidic.

Barlow-Tukaki said already they’d noticed the shells of pāua becoming thinner, and the inside smaller.

But it’s also the effects on land to worry about, from the mountains to sea.

The climate of the East Cape is predicted to become much drier, with more “extreme hot days”, but also more intense storms when they did arrive.

With some of the softest terrain in the country and a lot of it still recovering from mass burn-offs in the early colonial days, these conditions are predicted increase the already huge amounts of sediment and topsoil being washed off the whenua.

Already on the eastern side of the cape, the Waiapu River – sacred to Ngāti Porou – is choked with 35 million tonnes of sediment each year – 17 per cent of the entire country’s from a catchment representing just 0.6 per cent of the land.

On top of all of this the Raukūmara Ranges were on the verge of ecological collapse under a plague of introduced pests, meaning when those huge storms arrived there would be little flora to catch the water as it fell, and little to help temper the climate in times of drought.

Barlow-Tukaki said this loss of vegetation and influx of sediment had multiple impacts on the coast.

When it doesn’t rain the rivers nearly run dry – something they’ve seen already this recent summer – because there is little vegetation to hold the water and maintain a steady flow, while also depriving the rivermouth ecosystems of vital nutrient loads.

And when it does rain the rivers flood, bank to bank, and flush that sediment out to the coast, where it becomes stuck and smothers shellfish beds and even kelp beds, which act as fish nurseries.

This was one example of how climate change was predicted to have a greater impact on Māori, and indeed indigenous peoples worldwide.

In the Arctic as the ice melted indigenous groups were having to drastically change their entire food-gathering processes. In Brazil, various tribes were being displaced by fires, and activists persecuted and even murdered.

The Government here too has recognised as among the most vulnerable groups to climate-change impacts due to their “significant reliance on the environment as a cultural, social and economic resource”.