“Working with nature is a lot more complex in Oceania and spiritual than it might be in other places so if you are working with a river in Aotearoa you are working with people’s ancestor. It’s not just like a body of water that has a flow rate and this many particulates or whatever. It’s something that has mauri, it’s something that’s alive. And we’ve seen that in our work across other places in the Pacific that people see the natural world as alive. Mountains are alive, oceans are alive, rivers, forests. Often in the Western science framework, those things are not seen as living entities.” 

Maibritt Pedersen Zari (Te Wānanga Aronui O Tāmaki Makau Rau, Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand) is the Primary Research Investigator and Project Coordinator of NUWAO. We speak with her to get some insight into what the intentions of NUWAO are and how it aims to nurture the next generations to come through.  

“What we’re tying to do is just introduce a slightly more holistic way of thinking about nature-based solutions.”