Together, we are protecting nature and building a greener, more peaceful tomorrow. Here’s an update on some of the amazing things you are making happen through your support of Greenpeace.
You’re fighting to save the climate
We are fighting to save the climate and are supporting youth to get involved and have their voices heard. Here in New Zealand and around the world, youth are coming together to strike for action that will rescue our planet from climate breakdown.
Ignited by young climate activist Greta Thunberg, the original school striker, youth are standing up for their right to a future and it’s our job to amplify their voices.
In the past few months, we have witnessed the catastrophic effects of climate change in New Zealand. Torrential rain swept plastic from a landfill onto some of New Zealand’s remote beaches, polluting the ocean with harmful waste and impact marine life. A state of emergency was declared due to flooding in the West Coast. Fires raged in Nelson.
But together, with your support, we are fighting to flip the switch and make a difference. Thank you.
Now that new offshore oil and gas exploration permits have been banned, the next chapter of the fight has begun.
We continue to call upon the Government to prohibit any new fossil fuel development and urgently transition to renewable energy and transport. This is an urgent matter as Austrian oil company OMV plans to use their existing permit to drill new wells in one of New Zealand’s most important marine wildlife habitats.
But with your support, we are ready to take action. This has begun with non-violent direct action trainings in the community to help regular people take action to make oil history.
If you haven’t already, please sign on now in support of declaring a climate emergency.
You’re protecting oceans
A whale shark in Cenderawasih Bay National Park. Greenpeace is in Indonesia to document one of the world’s most biodiverse – and threatened – environments and to call for urgent action to ensure that the country’s oceans and forests are protected.
Climate change, overfishing, oil drilling, mining and plastic pollution have devastated our oceans for too long due to careless corporations putting profit before our planet.
To protect our oceans, in April this year we launched a global campaign to protect 30% of our oceans.
Through a network of ocean sanctuaries and a binding Global Oceans Treaty, we will put an end to destructive ocean practices.
With leading academics from the University of Oxford and the University of York, we have a plan for how to protect 30% of our oceans by 2030. This will safeguard marine life, foster a sustainable food supply and avoid some of the worst effects of climate change.
As a part of the campaign, we’ve launched a Pole-to-Pole voyage from the Arctic to the Antarctic with the Greenpeace ship, Esperanza. This voyage will highlight the increasing number of threats our oceans face, and will visit the front line of areas in urgent need of protection.
Thank you for fighting to conserve our oceans. Our lives – and marine animals’ lives – depend on them being healthy. Together, we will protect them.
Find out more about our work to protect the oceans.
You’re helping Māui Dolphins
The critically endangered Māui dolphin is the world’s smallest and rarest, with only around 60 of these beautiful creatures left.
Nets from the fishing industry can entangle them and cause drowning. Fishing nets also account for 46% of plastic waste found polluting the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Although nets have been banned in some Māui habitats, there are other areas where Māui dolphins are still at risk from them.
To protect this precious dolphin, we must extend the marine mammal sanctuary to cover their full habitat range, where net fishing and other harmful practices cannot take place.
This year, the Government is reviewing the threat management plan aimed at protecting the last of these dolphins. We need your help to make sure the Government acts urgently and boldly, before it is too late. With your help we can give this bubbly and playful creature a fighting chance.
Sign on to protect our Māui dolphins.
How you’re saving the Mackenzie
Mackenzie Country
The proliferation of intensive dairy farms in New Zealand is degrading our freshwater and increasing agriculture’s huge contribution to greenhouse gas emissions (48% of NZ emissions).
To put it simply – we have too many cows.
With your support the fight to save the South Island’s pristine Mackenzie Basin from a monster industrial dairy farm has made huge strides.
In 2018, activists chained themselves to diggers and earthmoving equipment involved in the $100 million industrial dairying operation, drawing attention to the plight of this ecologically fragile area.
Communities around the region rallied against the polluting development and its fate hung in the balance.
On the 3rd of April this year, the Environment Court ruled that the owner of the operation, Dunedin accountant Murray Valentine, didn’t have the necessary permissions to irrigate and sow grass seed on a large part of the farm, some of which is public crown lease land.
Thanks to your efforts, and the efforts of other environmental groups, Mr Valentine continues to face an uphill battle.
You’ve helped to shift public sentiment against the encroachment of industrial dairy into these iconic tussocklands.
We have to keep the pressure on if we want to see big changes in the agriculture industry. The council hearings have to be publicly advertised and submissions may be asked for. Stay tuned for more information and ways you can get involved.
How you’re standing up for New Zealand’s rivers
Aerial birds-eye of giant banner reading “STOP DAIRY EXPANSION” on the edge of lake Pūkaki.
Synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, used for industrial dairying, is polluting our rivers.
Companies like Ravensdown and Ballance, who make this harmful product, are generating huge profits off the back of environmental destruction.
Your support has helped us expose these companies and hold them accountable for the damage their product inflicts on the Earth. By using billboards that grabbed the media’s attention and supporting grassroots campaigners across the country, we continued to push the Government for a ban on the use of synthetic nitrogen.
After a complaint against our billboards, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled against us.
In its decision, the ASA accepted the scientific basis of the ads, however, it decided that “targeting individual companies is provocative and taking advocacy a step further than is necessary.”
Civil society must be able to hold specific companies accountable for environmental destruction, so we appealed the decision.
It’s thanks to your generosity that we’re exposing the truth about synthetic nitrogen and the companies behind it.
The amount of New Zealanders aware of this critical issue is growing, and it has even made international news headlines.
Together, we are saving our country’s rivers.
Find out more about the campaign to ban synthetic nitrogen.
Thank you for supporting Greenpeace. Together, we are powerful.
Fog surrounding the mountains and Humpback whales breaching the surface in Hope Bay, Antarctica. Greenpeace is about to conduct submarine-based scientific research to strengthen the proposal to create the largest protected area on the planet, an Antarctic Ocean Sanctuary.
Donate to Greenpeace today. We take no money from corporations or governments. Our independence and ability to speak and act freely is our greatest strength. To maintain that freedome, we rely on the generosity of people like you to keep us in action.