Health Frameworks

This project is developing a new framework to assess the risks to ecosystem health in Aotearoa New Zealand. It seeks to better reflect the dynamic and interconnected influences of geography, ecology, land use, and policy that affect how well our productive ecosystems can withstand pests, pathogens, and weeds.

Current decision-making tools often focus on local outcomes without fully accounting for broader feedback loops — how local land-use decisions ripple across the landscape over time. This project explores those feedback effects, aiming to design tools that account for both short- and long-term impacts across landscapes.

By integrating local practices, national policy, and landscape-scale processes, the framework will help decision-makers better understand ecosystem health risks and improve resilience in a changing climate.

The project team integrated diverse insights to identify contexts and locations
that promote ecosystem health and sustainable production. Focusing on forests,
pastures and wetlands, the team examined how landscapes are changing under
pressures like land-use change, climate change and emergent plant diseases
(e.g., myrtle rust).