Rock lobster industry commentator Daryl Sykes highlights the pressures placed on all legitimate fishing sectors when active management of fishing is deemed to be too hard and the simplest solutions are applied
Spatial closures – bans or restrictions on fishing in particular areas – are often presented as a simple, clean solution to coastal problems. Shut the gate on fishing, the thinking goes, and we will automatically get healthier ecosystems, better local abundance and happier communities.
But for people who actually go to sea – whether to earn a living, put fresh fish on the table, or uphold customary responsibilities – the reality is more complex.
Spatial closures are not cost-free tools. They can be necessary as a last gasp measure in some circumstances, but without a joined-up view of their cumulative effects, New Zealand risks eroding fishing opportunity, undermining settlement commitments and creating new sustainability problems in the very areas still left open to fish.
Around the New Zealand coastline, fishing grounds are increasingly being carved up by a patchwork of exclusions and restrictions. Some are driven by the Fisheries Act, using sustainability measures or customary tools. Others come from different laws altogether – marine reserves, marine farms, ports and cables, resource consents for coastal development, even special legislation. Each decision might look reasonable in isolation. Each is usually focused on a narrow purpose: protecting a patch of reef, supporting customary harvest, enabling aquaculture, or safeguarding a seabed cable. What is missing is a serious look at how all these measures add up at sea, and what that means for everyone who fishes there: commercial operators, local whānau, and weekend fishers alike.
For people on the water, what matters is not how many provisions sit in a statute book, but how much usable water is left. The cumulative effect of overlapping decisions is that all sectors are being squeezed into smaller, more marginal spaces. On paper, a commercial quota owner may still have the same tonnage. In practice, a growing slice of that stock sits behind lines that cannot be crossed. A recreational fisher might still see the same daily bag limit on the sign at the boat ramp, but the nearby spots where that limit used to be achievable are now tied up in closures and reserves. Customary rights may be recognised on paper, but local hapū can find that areas outside their rohe moana are under such pressure they feel forced to keep pushing for new restrictions. The result is a slow loss of practical access – not always obvious on any one map, but very obvious in people’s lived experience.
The pressure is most intense on species strongly tied to particular stretches of coast. Pāua and rock lobster are prime examples. These fisheries depend on specific reef systems; you cannot simply steam a few extra miles, drop a pot or a diver, and expect to find interchangeable grounds. In many areas, pāua divers, crayfishers, local kaitiaki and recreational potters now operate in a maze of restrictions. Customary mātaitai or taiāpure can set aside areas for non commercial use or limit particular methods. Temporary closures may be put in place to rebuild local abundance. Method bans and other sustainability measures can cut out further patches. Add in non fisheries closures for marine reserves, aquaculture, cables and coastal infrastructure, and a once continuous stretch of habitat can become a series of narrow channels and isolated pockets where any given group is still allowed to fish.
On the chart, each closure might look small: a line tucked around a reef here, a no take zone there, a marine farm boundary hugging a sheltered bay. But the effect is cumulative.
As these areas multiply, effort is pushed onto the remaining open reefs, and onto the same ramps, beaches and anchorages. The same amount of catch – or close to it – is being taken from a shrinking footprint. That is when localised depletion starts to creep in, not inside the reserves, but in the last few places where everyone is still allowed to fish. Ironically, closures intended to protect local abundance can end up shifting pressure onto neighbouring spots, creating new hotspots of depletion and new complaints from other users who suddenly see “too many boats” or “too many divers” in their favourite bay.
This displacement has direct consequences for all sectors. When long used grounds become off limits, commercial fishers face longer steaming and higher fuel bills; recreational boaties burn more fuel and time to reach a decent snapper mark; customary gatherers may travel further from their home marae to collect kaimoana. Catch rates can drop as people are pushed into less productive or more exposed areas. Species mixes change, affecting the value of a commercial trip and the satisfaction of a family fishing day. Competition intensifies on what remains of the best ground, increasing gear conflict, crowded anchorages and pressure at popular launching sites. For some commercial operators, this becomes real financial stress. For some communities, it means the easy, local access they once had to kaimoana and a feed of fish is gradually lost.
On top of this, there is a growing problem of uncertainty. Because cumulative spatial effects are rarely confronted head on, none of the sectors has a clear picture of what future access will look like. If a commercial fisher cannot be reasonably sure they will still be able to use core grounds in ten years, it becomes harder to justify investing in a new boat or gear. If a recreational club does not know how many of its traditional spots might be affected by new reserves or structures, long term planning becomes guesswork. If coastal hapū see piecemeal processes where the first few customary tools are approved and later ones struggle because “too much is now closed”, confidence in the system suffers and the hapu might feel they need to make an application to protect their interests. This uncertainty can sap the willingness of all groups to work together on local research, habitat projects or co management, because the future use of the space they care about is constantly in question.
Rising pressure in the remaining open areas inevitably increases interaction between sectors. Commercial boats find themselves working closer to popular recreational grounds. Recreational fishers see more pots, longlines or set nets near their favourite spots and may feel that “the commercials” are crowding them out.
Customary kaitiaki see more pressure just outside their mātaitai or taiāpure and may feel that the gains inside their boundaries are being cancelled out. If cumulative spatial exclusions undermine the ability to exercise customary rights in practice – by contributing to localised depletion outside customary areas, or by favouring “first cab off the rank” applications while later hapū miss out because the cumulative effect has finally been noticed – then the spirit of the Treaty Settlement is weakened. At the same time, if the commercial component of the settlement is eroded not by transparent decisions to reallocate, but by a slow shrinking of usable fishing space, then its value to iwi and hapū is chipped away in a way that ultimately affects the whole system’s fairness and legitimacy.
Instead of building shared solutions to shared problems – such as degraded habitats, land based pollution or climate impacts – energy gets absorbed in complaint and counter complaint, as each new closure or restriction is seen as either a victory or a threat, rather than part of a coordinated plan.
None of this is an argument against closures per se. There are situations where closing an area to certain methods or to all fishing is the most effective way to protect vulnerable habitats, rebuild local stocks, or recognise cultural values. Most fishers, regardless of sector, understand that some places and times need extra protection. The problem is that closures have become a go to response in many different policy silos, without enough attention to whether they are the right tool for the job, whether they are designed as tightly as they could be, and how they interact with all the other lines already drawn on the chart. In plenty of cases, less blunt instruments could achieve the same or better outcomes with a smaller hit to fishing opportunity for everyone. In fact, closures represent management failure- because steps have not been taken to manage before closure becomes necessary.
Alternative approaches already exist and can be expanded. Instead of shutting down an area entirely, managers and communities can work together to set local catch limits at a finer scale, or to tune effort controls in hotspots of concern. If a particular gear type is causing the problem, banning or modifying that method in the affected zone may do the job, while still allowing lower impact fishing by other methods and sectors to continue.
In cases where genuine protection is needed over a wider area, thought can be given to making the closure no larger than necessary, and to adjusting total catch limits so that displaced effort does not quietly create new sustainability risks somewhere else. Customary and recreational aspirations can be considered at a regional scale, rather than one bay at a time, so that rights and expectations are shared more fairly across hapū and communities.
When non fishing uses are involved – such as aquaculture, offshore energy, or other coastal developments – there are clear opportunities to plan sites in ways that minimise overlap with the most productive and most important fishing grounds. Developers can be required to sit down with affected fishers, clubs and Iwi to negotiate fair arrangements and, where appropriate, compensation or practical mitigation. The law already expects cumulative effects on people and communities to be considered in coastal planning decisions; the challenge is to make sure that the real, practical impacts on all forms of fishing are fully understood and weighed alongside the benefits of the new activity.
What ties all of this together is the need for a more coherent, strategic approach to space in the sea. Instead of treating each closure in a vacuum, New Zealand needs marine management that consistently asks a few simple questions. What problem are we actually solving here? Is a closure the most effective and least disruptive way to solve it? How much access has already been lost in this area or fishery, and what will this new measure do to that balance for commercial, recreational and customary fishers? Where will displaced effort go, and what does that mean for sustainability, for different fishing communities, and for Treaty commitments? Only when those questions are answered honestly can decision makers weigh up whether the benefits of a proposed closure truly outweigh the costs.
For readers of a fishing and hunting paper, the story is not that closures are always wrong, or that nothing should ever change. The story is that space is becoming the new currency in our coastal waters, and that the way we make decisions about that space has consequences for everyone who values the sea. Every new line drawn on the chart has ripple effects, especially when added to dozens of others that came before.
Spatial closures are powerful tools, but they are not cost free. Used sparingly, with clear objectives and a careful eye on cumulative impacts, they can help protect the very resources that all fishers depend on. Used casually, or without an overall plan, they risk hollowing out fishing opportunity, fraying relationships between sectors, and shifting pressure in ways that make both fish and fishers worse off in the long run. Closures should be a last resort, and not an alternative to management.
