Spreading its wings

Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne is home to some of New Zealand’s most rare and extraordinary wildlife, boasts over 16,000 members and is a magnet for the thousands of cruise ship passengers visiting the capital.

The world’s first fully fenced urban ecosanctuary has a 500-year vision to restore forest and freshwater ecosystems as closely as possible to their pre-human state.

That ambitious commitment requires a level of governance to match, says the chair of its board of trustees, Phillip Meyer CFInstD. “We’ve been on a road to get Zealandia to best practice,” he says. As part of this effort, a governance review was carried out.

“There were a number of impediments we knew about because it’s an element of a community organisation in many ways, but the review was essential for ensuring we took the right steps for the benefit of Zealandia,” Meyer says.

Recommendations adopted from the review included the addition of a tangata whenua partnership advisory group, and an advisory group which focuses on research and restoration of the valley which will be supported by Victoria University of Wellington.

“We call a full board meeting every quarter and have interim board meetings in between,” Meyer says. “They can include anything the chief executive wants to report, or anything the board members are concerned about, plus a look at the finances to make sure we’re travelling on plan and that our non- financial objectives are on track for achievement.

“At the end of that interim meeting, we have some professional development. It could be a deep dive into something within the business, or it could be some governance or professional development. Other improvements in governance we have made include reporting into subcommittees.”

The board did a deep dive in September into Zealandia’s fire risk and how it could mitigate the risk, and then respond if there were a fire in the valley. “The world’s getting hotter,” says Meyer, a professional director who has extensive experience and specific expertise in financial sustainability and ESG.

He says they could always provide a better service, so the ecosanctuary is updating its Customer Relationship Management software and website, and how it can use information so they know the patronage patterns of visitors better and what their needs are. It is also looking at providing augmented reality to enhance the visitor experience.

“Having done all this work and bringing it up to what we regard as best practice, according to our review, we want to maintain best practice of the board capability itself,” Meyer says.

It was decided each board member would be given an opportunity to keep their personal knowledge and learning up to best practice, and to keep it there. “We are often sharing information from the IoD so we decided everyone would become members through the whole board membership,” Meyer says.

“The sanctuary is running really well but joining the IoD means the governance standard can be held at so-called best practice. That’s what we’re looking to achieve from the whole board membership.”

The Zealandia board comprises scientists, professors, conservationists and environmentalists among others, and consists of two main committees. One is a people, capability and culture committee, with culture considered the most important by Meyer. “When we hire new people, they can have all the experience in the world, but if it’s not a cultural fit it won’t work,” he says. The second committee is audit and risk, with both committees reporting to the board in the normal way.

“My biggest reward is working with the people. They are absolutely fantastic and the culture of the place is to be mutually supportive,” Meyer says, highlighting his relationship with CEO Dr Danielle Shanahan.

The board is also kept up to date with any risk or near misses thanks to a specially developed health and safety app that works on a ‘no fault’ system. “By the time it comes to the board, the issue has generally been taken care of. It’s a very good system and the staff are all engaged in it,” Meyer says.

Zealandia is working with US technology company Persefoni AI Inc to help provide a platform to measure scope one, two and three emissions. “We’re currently building the database on their platform, meaning even a cup of coffee bought in the cafe will have an emissions reading.

“We’re not a captured company for purposes of reporting, but we want to lead in this area. We’ve been net carbon zero for seven or eight years now, but while we are at net zero we want to focus on reducing our gross emissions.”

Meyer says they take great pride in reducing gross emissions – “they are 50 per cent of what they used to be in 2015” – with electric vehicles travelling frequently to and from the city each day. There are charging stations at Zealandia as well.

It is cost increases that are exercising the board’s mind, he says, as those increases eke their way into the business. He cites a 10 per cent increase in the living wage, a general increase in salaries, and audit costs virtually doubling in the past few years and becoming more complicated around non- financial measures.

“The point is these costs cannot be recovered in the revenue line through price increases. We don’t want to put our price up and we haven’t for the past few years despite inflation. Household disposable income is under pressure and we want to do the right thing by our community. It’s a careful balance in terms of absorbing costs.”

However, it takes a lot more revenue to get the same profit as five years ago. “The margins have been squeezed and that’s because of the increase in delivery costs,” he says. “That’s a business risk that we have to keep very closely on our mind.”

That means juggling the “nice-to-have” projects and the revenue from the summer months.

“We have a number of feeders and nest boxes out through the valley. It’s quite a large area [225 hectares], about eight kilometres around. We have to maintain all of the infrastructure, traps for predators, and monitor the conservation outcomes. And we’ve also got to maintain the fence, just looking for anything that might have breached it – or erosion.”

Zealandia is a groundbreaking conservation project that has reintroduced more than 20 species of native wildlife into the area. More than 40 different species of native birds have been recorded in the sanctuary. It has also translocated rifleman/titipounamu, New Zealand’s smallest bird, and they are now being seen outside the fence and around the city.

Meyer says they have “generally exceeded” their objectives since coming out of the pandemic. Before Covid-19 neither the board nor the chief executive had anything that kept them awake at night, figuratively speaking, he says.

“Things were running well. We were hitting our maximums on visitation and revenue and the like. So I said, let’s contemplate that we might lose a bucket of revenue. We couldn’t think of a reason. In September of 2019 the board had a plan before it on how it would support staff, without either reducing salaries or sacking anyone, allow the cost-to-income ratio to go up and then being able to recover the revenue.”

“We took the plan off the shelf and had to modify it a bit, but we applied it and we didn’t have to sack any permanent staff. We maintained the valley and we took the opportunity to do some infrastructure improvements because all these things need maintenance all the time. And we saw our way through with government support as well, and delivered a surplus that year too, despite the big loss in revenue.

“It was turbulent in terms of trying to maintain the viability of the whole enterprise. This year we’re looking at our eighth operating surplus,” says Meyer, who stands down as chair in December having come to the end of the maximum term. Deputy chair Russell Spratt will take over. 

As a whole

The whole board membership (also referred to as Boardwide) allows for all members of an organisation’s board to join as individual IoD members. When a board member leaves the new member can join the whole board membership as their replacement.

Find out more about whole board membership.