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David Van Der Zouwe (Senior Manager, Strategic Partnerships at Department of Conservation | Te Papa Atawhai)

David Van Der Zouwe

Senior Manager, Strategic Partnerships at Department of Conservation | Te Papa Atawhai

David van der Zouwe is Director Partnerships and Investment at the Department of Conservation in New Zealand (DOC). DOC faces challenges to achieve its conservation objectives with limited resources and a lack of public awareness and engagement regarding the biodiversity crisis. It is estimated DOC has 10 -15% of the necessary funds to meet its biodiversity conservation goals and one piece of research noted that 58% of New Zealanders thought that the countries’ biodiversity is in good shape. DOC’s Strategic Partnerships function can address these challenges by: harnessing collective action for nature and attracting resources (through private finance, commercial and philanthropic) to support priority programmes and conservation across New Zealand.

David comes to the role from a legal, commercial and investment background. Immediately prior to joining DOC David had 4 years as head of investment at Kānoa. Kānoa works with other Government organisations and industry, communities, hapū, iwi, Māori organisations and local government to manage and deliver funds tailored to build New Zealand’s regional economies. Since 2018, the Government has allocated $4.5 billion towards a range of funds managed and administered by Kānoa. In particular, the team David lead had responsibility for managing circa $850 million of equity, debt and asset investments for Crown Regional Holdings Limited (CRHL). CRHL is the Schedule 4A company that holds Kanoa’s assets. Prior to his role at Kanoa, David was a Senior Commercial Leader on strategic government projects, a Client Executive and manager at Spark Digital and a lawyer for the Spark family of companies.

Catrina Rowe (Sustainability Manager at Silver Fern Farms)

Catrina Rowe

Sustainability Manager at Silver Fern Farms

Cat has been working at the nexus between policy & systems change since before it was cool. She is part of the team working to deliver on Silver Fern Farms’ ambition to be a trusted nature positive food producer and leads work focused on nature indexing, investment, market-facing claims and labelling. Before joining Silver Fern Farms, Cat spent a decade living in the Pacific working on climate and economic issues and from 2012 – 2014 acted as an advisor to the New Zealand Foreign Minister during New Zealand’s successful campaign for the United Nations Security Council.