All Posts

Our story began with a simple belief: that meaningful change in Aotearoa starts with connection -to people, to whenua, and to purpose. When we founded Kaitiaki Collective in 2019, our focus was clear - to help Māori organisations and small businesses embed sustainability and kaupapa Māori values into their operations. Over time, our mahi expanded beyond consulting and reporting. We found ourselves supporting iwi environmental units to plan, protect and enhance their rohe, and

Cultural Impact Assessments sit at one of the more demanding intersections of practice in Aotearoa. They carry cultural weight, statutory weight, and project weight, often all at once. They are asked to honour mātauranga held over generations while meeting the consenting timelines of a project that wants to move next quarter. And, in our experience, most of the people writing them are doing so without a settled structure to lean on. That tension is worth talking about openly.

Across boardrooms, council chambers, marae committees, and small business kitchens, the same conversation is happening this year. Budgets are tighter. Policy direction keeps shifting. Funding rounds are slimmer or have disappeared altogether. And in the middle of it, the environmental work, the climate work, the community wellbeing work, all of it is being asked to justify itself again. That is the weather we are working in. Pretending otherwise does not help anyone. But neit

You know sustainability matters. Your customers have started asking. A funder dropped a question into your last application. A buyer wants a one-pager before they renew the contract. You sit down to write something, and the cursor blinks back at you. This is the moment most small business sustainability work stalls. It stalls because there is no obvious place to start, no template that fits the size of the business, and no one in-house whose job it actually is to figure it ou

Conservation land rarely shows up first on a board agenda. It tends to sit in the periphery. The bush above the marae, the catchment upstream of the housing development, the alpine basin whose health quietly governs what your downstream operations can and cannot do. Which is precisely why the Conservation Amendment Bill 2026 deserves a longer look than legislation in this kind of week usually gets.

Across Aotearoa, conversations about climate change are shifting. They are moving out of policy papers and into business kitchens — where someone is opening an insurance renewal letter and finding the premium has doubled, or where a long-standing supplier has just sent through a new questionnaire asking about Scope 3 emissions and physical risk. In our work this past year, we have heard the same thing from many small business owners and iwi-led enterprises: the cost of climat

[blog post from 2022] The IPCC released it’s sixth report recently and it was every bit as scary and damning as I expected it to be. Climate risks are projected to increase for a wide range of systems, sectors and communities, which are exacerbated by underlying vulnerabilities and exposures (high confidence) (IPCC Report, 2022) For us in Australasia, there were nine key risks identified {ES-Ch11}: Loss and degradation of coral reefs and associated biodiversity and ecosystem

Operating in the environmental and sustainability space for over a decade has taught me many things, and for the most part it is filled with well meaning, bright, passionate people who do a fantastic job for their chosen organisation. However, for an industry that focuses on the taiao (environment) and equal outcomes in the corporate space, it is severely in need of more indigenous voices. I’m not saying this in a sense that we need more diverse faces at the table, I’m saying