28 September, 2024

Crimson pōhutukawa rusting away as government cuts funding

As daily dog walkers along Takapuna beach, with its fringe of pōhutukawa, we can’t help thinking how deeply saddened we would be if these trees, with their glorious annual display of crimson blossoms, were no more.
Can you imagine the North Island without pōhutukawa? Rangitoto Island stripped back to hot black rock? This is the question the editor of NZ Geographic, Catherine Woulfe, posed in a recent editorial.
She is not scaremongering. Pōhutukawa on Rangitoto, the largest pōhutukawa forest in the world, are infected with myrtle rust. This was first reported in 2023. They are at risk of being decimated by the disease in the foreseeable future!
This invasive, airborne fungal disease blew into New Zealand and spread rapidly. It affects plants in the myrtle family, including significant natives: pōhutukawa, rātā, mānuka and kānuka.
Severe myrtle rust infestations can kill affected plants and have long-term impacts on regeneration of young plants and seedlings.
There are a great many more pōhutukawa on the North Shore’s beaches, parks and private properties that we could also lose. One, about 80 years old, grows in our suburban front garden and attracts many tūī. We treasure it.
But there is hope! Catherine Woulfe tells us that “teams of scientists and kaitiaki have been working with urgency to understand myrtle rust – and combat it. They’ve come up with promising weapons, too: fungi and insects with a taste for myrtle rust; seed-banking and resistance-testing programmes; antifungal spraying; and a high-tech new spray from Aussie that (in the lab, at least) not only protects plants, but also cleans up rust in plants already struggling.”
But all of this innovation is about to hit the wall. As she says, “funding for the optimistically named umbrella programme ‘Beyond Myrtle Rust’ ended this month. Likewise, the Jobs for Nature teams that spent years monitoring the rust and developing ways to fight it are about to be left in the financial wilderness.”
The unwillingness of our government to renew the funding to fight myrtle rust is beyond belief. Surely everything possible should be done to save our pōhutukawa and other iconic plants affected by this fungus and to preserve them for future generations.
To avoid this environmental catastrophe we, the public, need to speak out and persuade the government to reverse their decision.
Lyn Potter

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