More than one hundred walking tracks have been reopened after years of closures designed to protect kauri threatened by disease.
In a seven-year, $49.4 million project, Auckland Council partnered with Te Kawerau-ā-Maki to upgrade 173km of walkways across 109 spots.
Kauri Dieback disease is caused by a microscopic organism, Phytophthora agathidicida. It spreads through contaminated soil, attacking kauri roots, cutting off water and nutrients, and destroying the giants from the inside out.
Humans and animals aid the transmission of the organism, and the results can be catastrophic - the tree canopy across Kauri forests is now dotted by white skeletal remains.
Iwi trust chief executive, Edward Ashby, says he’s happy about the outcome but noted that it was a “double-edged sword” as the iwi would prefer track closures until the disease is dealt with.
“There’s no cure for the disease... and so once it’s in an ecosystem, once it’s in the soil, it’s there until we find a cure,” he says.
“Ultimately this provides a compromise, a safe pathway for people to come in and enjoy the ngahere, because it’s beautiful, but also to look after that ngahere.”
Kauri dieback reached a critical point in the Waitākere Ranges in 2017, causing the iwi to place a rāhui.
Ashby says it was a struggle at first to get the council on board, but expressed gratitude that it did end up taking action later and extended it across Auckland.
“Council, to be fair, came to the party a little later than I would have liked. But they came to the party, which is what matters.
“We placed that rāhui. We asked council if they would work with us on that in advance, and the answer was no, and so we said we’d do it anyway.
“We were told we weren’t allowed, and we said, we weren’t asking permission.”
“Ever since then, we’ve had a really close working relationship on this kaupapa with them,”.
Phil Brown, the council’s Head of Natural Environment Delivery, says initially there wasn’t enough money and that some community members weren’t supportive.
“People have a lot of identity wrapped up in their ability to go into the ngahere and to connect with nature,” he says.
“We don’t want to keep people out of the forest for the sake of it, but we needed to make sure that people weren’t loving the kauri to death,”.
The project was funded through Auckland Council’s Natural Environment Targeted Rate (NETR), paid by city taxpayers. The work was later halted by the COVID endemic as well as Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023.
The work has since lifted paths above kauri root systems, improved drainage and added 135 more hygiene stations.
The hope now is that strollers and trampers will do their part to protect the trees by using the stations and sticking to the tracks.
