Wellington Zoo is New Zealand’s first Zoo and Wellington’s oldest conservation organisation, caring for animals since 1906. A charitable trust, it is a member of the Zoo and Aquarium Association Australasia (ZAA) and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA). Wellington Zoo is the world’s first Toitū carboNZero certified zoo.
Amy Hughes is the director of communication, experience, and conservation at Wellington Zoo. She has worked there since 2005 in various roles encompassing marketing, communications, visitor experience, education, conservation, and sustainability. She speaks to blooloop about the zoo’s mission.
Me tiaki, kia ora!
Hughes has been on the ZAA board since 2020, was the Oceania Representative on the International Zoo Educators Association Board for five years, and has worked with Zoo Educators and engagement professionals worldwide. She is recognised as a leader in Zoo visitor engagement and learning.
Part of Wellington Zoo’s senior leadership team, Hughes has been instrumental in the institution’s transformation, both physically and experientially. In 2017, she spent five months in Sydney as the acting executive director of ZAA, leading the organisation through a transition period while a new permanent executive director was appointed.
Passionate about connecting people to animals and encouraging positive, sustainable environmental behaviours, she led the Wellington Zoo project to become the world’s first carboNZero-certified Zoo through Toitū Envirocare net carboNZero accreditation.
“Te Nukuao Wellington Zoo is New Zealand’s first Zoo,” Hughes tells blooloop. “We’ve been here since 1906 in the heart of Wellington and have been loved by the community all that time. We are very aware of our part as a community institution, and our community is incredibly important to us. When discussing our mission or vision, a Maori language phrase, ‘Me tiaki, kia ora!’ is our kaupapa, our ethos. Though it’s not a complete translation, it means that we must look after the planet so all things will thrive.
“We must look after the animals in our care so they will thrive; we must look after the visitors who come into the Zoo so they will thrive; we must look after the Zoo itself as a space so it will thrive into the future. It’s about caring for people, animals, and the environment so that all life will thrive. That underpins everything we do. It comes through strongly in our approach to running the Zoo and interacting with our visitors.”
Wellington Zoo’s strategy
Underlying the Zoo’s strategy are the foundations it needs to maintain to ensure a healthy organisation.
“There are the things we do daily to create a happy, healthy, and safe workplace, “ she says. “Committing to outstanding daily visitor care, maintaining and improving our physical assets: the base of the healthy organisation.”
From that base, four pillars sit on top of that:
“Whānau, our role, is about protecting our planet. It aims to set aspirational sustainability targets based on our chosen UN SDGs and retain net carbon zero certification through climate action.”
Te Nukuao Wellington Zoo has been net carbon zero certified for 13 years.
“Whānau is concerned with ensuring we keep going on that journey and engage our wider community and stakeholders with our climate impact actions.”
The next pillar is Tinana, the animals. She explains:
“There, we are looking at science-based animal welfare practices so the animals are happy and live their best lives, as well as strategic species planning for our site and staff expertise. When animals come into the zoo, we make sure we can look after them, have a space for them, and care for them for their whole lives.
“Rather than saying, ‘That’s a cute animal; we would love to have it,’ we ask, ‘Is it good for visitors? Does it have a strong conservation message? Do we have the skills here to look after it? It’s concerned with ensuring we are strategic in that species planning space.”
Hinengaro represents the institution’s purpose:
“This is about saving wildlife and wild places, building recognition as conservation experts, building effective field partnerships for long-term conservation outcomes, and exploring how we can invest in conservation innovations and our community.”
Finally, Wairua is about community. She stresses the importance of this last piece:
“This encompasses how we maintain access to the Zoo for all community members. It means thinking about inclusion, diversity, equity, and belonging. We have a strong community partnership program, ensuring we maintain the Zoo’s good reputation and engagement with our community. We also build engaging, message-driven conservation and education-based visitor experiences.”
The four values
The zoo’s four values underpin the strategy. The first is He whānau kotahi tātou, or Welcome to our Wild Party.
“This is about how we welcome people, animals, and new staff. How, in short, we make sure we’re a place of welcoming. It’s rooted in that understanding it should be a fun place.”
Secondly, Ka rongo te pō, ka rongo te ao means We’re a voice to be heard: “What we say has value,” explains Hughes. Then comes Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, ēngari he toa takitini, or We punch above our weight.
Finally, Me manawanui: “This one is sometimes controversial with our animal teams (because why not scaly, for example?). It means we have a strong, green, furry heart.
“The strong green furry heart is essentially about the notion of care: caring for the environment, caring for the animals, caring for each other, caring for our space. Underpinning all of that is a Maori concept called manaakitanga, which is about being welcoming, generous, supporting, and kind, about recognising and respecting the mana, or the being, of another person. It is concerned with ensuring we build a base of welcoming hospitality and kindness into everything we do.”
A bicultural organisation
When Tu Nukuao adopted its Te Reo Māori name, Te Nukuao Tūroa o Te Whanganui, it was a chance to acknowledge that the land on which the Zoo stands remains home to those who held the land previously. It reflects the Zoo’s identity going forward as it becomes a bicultural organisation.
“We have been doing a lot of work with a cultural consultant, someone we’ve worked with for probably 10 years. It’s been a real evolution as we build more towards biculturalism. We’re thinking about how to build the Te Ao Māori worldview into our operations meaningfully.
“It has to go beyond just putting a name or a Maori language sign up. There must be knowledge and intent behind everything we do. It’s an amazing, evolving piece of work. Our base Te Ao Māori strategy will lead us for the next three years in terms of what we do in that space. It’s super exciting.”
Two decades at Wellington Zoo
Hughes has been closely involved with the Zoo’s development over the last two decades, particularly in the learning, experiential and sustainability spaces.
She started as a marketing and communications advisor at the Zoo in November 2005. At this point, the Zoo, which was getting about 170,000 visitors a year, was about to celebrate its hundredth birthday. It was also embarking on a 10-year capital redevelopment program:
“I started on the cusp of all the big changes that followed. It was a really interesting time to start. Having seen it through this lengthy period, all those things that were starting to come in train when I started have all come to fruition, better than we could have imagined.”
Hughes went from marketing comms advisor to team leader and then manager in rapid succession:
“I then had an opportunity to fill in on parental leave for the discovery and learning manager. So, I moved over to manage the learning team: our formal education volunteers, our visitor experience and interpretation.”
Transformation
The Zoo had embarked on its capital redevelopment, so Hughes was thrown in at the deep end in having to develop visitor experience and interpretation for brand-new spaces in the Zoo:
“I loved it,” she says. “It was an amazing opportunity. But it was also fun to think about how we could use these spaces to engage our visitors, build their understanding, equip them with an action message to take home, and also encourage them to want to spend more time in the Zoo, have fun, and think about loving and caring for the animals as much as we do.”
Almost by serendipity, Hughes had found her ideal job.
“I was thinking about this a couple of years ago as we built our snow leopard habitat,” she says. “I was down there every day with my hard hat and my boots on, helping to design the habitat from a visitor viewpoint, going to the quarry and picking rocks. How, when I was at university studying marketing, could I ever have imagined this would be my job?
“I love that creative, collaborative process of designing amazing spaces for our visitors, our community, for our animals, and also making sure that this space that’s been here for 118 years continues to be relevant and loved by the community.”
Conservation partners
As a leading conservation institution, the Zoo is perhaps more relevant now than ever. Conservation is at the core of everything the Zoo does; the institution’s commitment is to saving wildlife and wild places.
“As a Zoo, while we operate here, our reach goes far beyond our fence. We are partnering with fantastic conservation organisations worldwide with whom we have longstanding commitments.
“One of the coolest things I’ve done in my career is our conservation summit, Wild Ideas. All our conservation partners from around the world came to Wellington Zoo and presented their work. They met our staff, saw the Zoo, and understood who we were. So often in these relationships, you have people from projects who may be receiving money from you, or you might have one or two staff who go out there to in situ initiatives. But there isn’t always a connection back to the Zoo.
“It was really special and so good for our staff to connect. There was a real sense of understanding that connection back to the work. I remember thinking: this is why I’m doing my work.”
Hughes says it is vital that people think about themselves as part of nature so that nature is not separate and othered.
“The more we can build that understanding of people being part of nature, how all the systems in nature rely on each other; the more people understand the concept that we are natural beings, and we are part of that system, the more opportunity we have to engage people in thinking about nature, and in moving from individual action, like turning off a light switch, to collective and civic action, to move the dial.”
A carbon-zero approach at Wellington Zoo
Wellington Zoo is the world’s first Toitū net carboNZero certified Zoo. It continues to work tirelessly to reduce its environmental impact.
“Around 18 years ago, we had a part-time sustainability person here for a short time. One of the very first things we did was a waste audit.”
It was discovered at that stage that 97% of the Zoo’s waste was going to landfill.
“We said, ‘Okay, we can do better’. So, we started implementing things across the Zoo. We recycled, and reduced our waste to landfill in the first couple of years by 90%. We set up a green team at the Zoo – I was a part of it – and thought about how to encourage people to think about environmental sustainability and how we could make the Zoo more environmentally sustainable.”
Everyone across the Zoo was asked to contribute their ideas on how to make the Zoo more sustainable:
“We managed to implement about 65% of them. We were essentially starting from a zero baseline. There’s something about just doing stuff without knowing what your limits are. We just said, ‘Let’s try this,’ and we had a lot of success, so we moved on to looking at becoming Carbon Zero certified.
“We had someone take us on a feasibility study. About three weeks in, he said, ‘You guys are ready; let’s just do it.’ We went through the audit process – it was super exciting. At this stage, we were the first Zoo in the world to be net carbon zero certified through that program. As far as we know, we’re the second Zoo to be carbon neutral certified after Zoos Victoria in Australia.”
A continuous journey
This, she explains, was the beginning of a fantastic journey:
“The point is not to be the first and only. The point is that others see it as achievable. I remember speaking to the city council because the mayor, who had previously been on our board, wanted to talk about how we’d made it happen and how they could make it happen. We had a celebration. But I kept telling everyone that this was not the end of the process but the start of a journey. We still had a long way to go. We still have a long way to go.”
It is, she explains, a continuous process of reduction, measuring, and learning.
“We are also broadening our view to encompass social as well as financial sustainability.”
Because the Zoo is a charity, around four or five years ago, it was decided to focus on specific United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs):
“To ensure we were setting chart targets and achievements above and beyond what we were already doing, and to focus a concerted effort in that space, we did surveys with stakeholders and visitors, and workshops with staff to look at which of the SDGs were the most relevant to us and those groups.
“Our conservation manager then created a fantastic mind map based on the UN recommendations and the WAZA sustainability guide. From that, we identified things we were already doing, things we were doing but weren’t measuring, and things that we had control over and could relatively easily implement.
“We have two to three targets for each of our six SDGs. We review them every year. Our goal is to get 80% of the targets. It’s a learning, evolving process. It has been super interesting because we must also involve the whole Zoo.”
Digital sustainability at Wellington Zoo
One area of carbon emissions that often escapes scrutiny is the online world – something we all tend to take for granted. Digital sustainability is an area where the Zoo has been focusing its efforts in a project that has, by minimising the size of website pages, reduced estimated carbon emissions from the Zoo website by 26.5%.
The project arose from a conversation:
“The marketing and comms manager and I were talking to our technology partners, AKQA. They said they had been doing some work on digital sustainability. We were super interested; we always want to learn new stuff, so they presented to us.”
It was, she says, a revelation. “Everything online has a footprint,” she says. “‘The Cloud’ is the greatest marketing piece ever: it sounds so natural and innocuous.”
In fact, it is a vast interlinked system of servers hosting software and system infrastructure.
“If the internet were a country, it would be the sixth highest carbon emitter in the world. Once we realised this, we couldn’t unknow it. We asked AKQA to audit our website, looking at the top 20 pages. We measured the page’s weight, or emissions, in terms of how long content takes to load and how often that page is viewed.
“Then we decided to see what we could do to minimise the website’s footprint since that’s something we control.”
Making a real impact
They determined to do this without compromising on quality:
“We still needed to have cute animal pictures on there. The website must still be engaging and reflect the Zoo and what we want to do. It has to be functional for people. In the end, we did several things. We reduced the size of photos on the website, and we also found that people were uploading photos and not deleting the old ones. Some images would be loading both versions as you scrolled, which was heavier to load.
“At that stage, whenever anyone in the Zoo turned their computer on, the Zoo website home came up as soon as the browser opened. We realised that if we stopped it doing that, it would reduce the number of times the page was loading.”
The changes Hughes and her team made under AKQA’s guidance were relatively simple but effective. The setup of colours and backgrounds was simplified to reduce file size, the staff browsers were set to Wellington City Council intranet rather than wellingtonZoo.com to minimise unnecessary loading, and the structure of the most-visited pages was altered to minimise the amount of content initially loaded on the page.
In addition, the image sizes were reviewed to ensure they weren’t larger than necessary. All image file sizes were reduced, and a new process to resize new photos automatically was initiated. Plus, an old backup server was decommissioned.
The impact of data and AI
Hughes says:
“Our carbon emissions for last year were about 160 tons. Before we did that work, the website was about two tons, so it’s not an insignificant amount.”
To have reduced that by 26.5% is a significant impact.
“As I was doing that work, I started learning more about digital sustainability,” she adds. “Everything on your computer and phone has a carbon footprint. As we store more stuff, bigger data centres must be built. Those data centres are incredibly power and water-hungry, contributing to increased power prices and water use.”
Then, there is AI’s carbon footprint. Where a Google search uses 0.2g of C02, the equivalent AI search uses around 4.32g.
Hughes presented on digital sustainability at the ZAA conference:
“My succinct wrap-up of digital sustainability is that it’s going to have an increasing impact on the planet as we continue to rely on technology,” she says. “It’s something we need to think about. Do we need ten virtually identical photos of our dog on our phone or just one?”
Connecting people with animals at Wellington Zoo
Last April, the Zoo completed its $6 million snow leopard development. Concerning future plans, Hughes says:
“We did some work last year on a 20-year master plan. We hope to start that in three or four years.”
The master plan builds on the evolution of the last 20 years, incorporating innovations. In a world threatened by climate change, species decline and disconnectedness from nature, it empowers Te Nukuao Wellington Zoo to step forward and lead by example. This will encompass necessary site improvements, strategic thinking, species care and community aspirations as the Zoo moves forward as a resilient, agile, and progressive institution, showcasing exemplary animal welfare, innovation, and extraordinary visitor experiences.
In the meantime:
“We have regular, smaller projects. After the snow leopards, we built a lace monitor habitat. People don’t find that as exciting as snow leopards, but it is still very important for us. The real trick to being a Zoo is to bring people in for the big, sexy, charismatic animals and get them super excited about other things. One of my favourite animals is the Wellington Green Gecko.
“I love it. It has a blue mouth; it’s from this place, and it’s beautiful. I like to say to people, ‘Oh, come and see the snow leopards,’ then, on the way back, ‘Have you ever seen a Wellington Green Gecko? Come with me.’”
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