Oceans of Change
From surfing in Mexico to leading sustainability at PwC, Camden Howitt went from ocean activist to global change-maker.
As the hot Mexican sun beat down on his shoulders, Camden Howitt paddled out on his surfboard towards the horizon. But his surf session resulted in a nasty surprise — not an epic wipeout, but a used nappy to the face.
“Times like that you sort of go, ‘We’ve got to do a lot better for nature and for ourselves. This impacts us.”
The year was 2005 and the then 21-year-old Howitt was on a study trip to Mexico. It was an experience that ignited Howitt’s passion for protecting and regenerating our oceans and waterways. A couple years after returning to his home in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Howitt co-founded Sustainable Coastlines, a not-for-profit organisation that delivers large-scale coastal clean-ups, education programs and litter data collection activities around New Zealand.
To date, the Sustainable Coastlines team has removed a hefty 1.8 million litres of litter from New Zealand coastlines, planted more than 330,000 trees to help prevent pollution runoff into waterways and provided ocean-action and environmental education for over 250,000 attendees from schools and businesses.
Since starting his sustainability journey, Howitt, now 41 years old, has become a leading voice in both the national and global conversation on marine pollution and environmental protection. He has addressed the United Nations three times on a global stage, twice at its headquarters in New York and again at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya.
Curious to see what other ways he could provoke meaningful change for the planet, Howitt departed from Sustainable Coastlines in 2022. He’s now engaged in a senior role in PwC’s Sustainability, Climate and Nature team, leading a program that encourages some of New Zealand’s biggest and most influential companies to integrate nature and the environment into their decision making.
Howitt’s eff orts have also earned him New Zealand’s 2023 Environmental Hero of the Year award, a category of the New Zealander of the Year Awards.
Moana memories
The seedling of Howitt’s love for nature was planted in childhood. Raised in Christchurch on the South Island, Howitt recalls happy memories of holidays in the great outdoors with his parents and three siblings.
Both his parents were teachers, and most school holidays involved a trip immersed in nature. “Every Easter, we would go camping or hiking in the bush around rivers, lakes, forest, somewhere in Te Waipounamu, the South Island of New Zealand … and then we’d spend basically four to six weeks every summer at this beach, Ōpito Bay, in the Coromandel.”
Despite having now travelled the world to far-flung places, Howitt still describes being by the ocean in Opito Bay as his favourite place. “I think that as New Zealanders and South Pacific Islanders, we’re so connected to the ocean,” says Howitt. “We get kaimoana [seafood] there, so it feeds us. It’s a place where I have a lot of family memories … It’s also a place where I’ve seen the environment both at its best and at its worst.”
Growing up, Howitt’s sisters were passionate about sustainable living. They would rescue discarded food from supermarket dumpsters and run environmental protests. While Howitt always loved nature, he didn’t fully connect with environmentalism or initially share his sisters’ passion for it until the trip to Mexico changed his perspective and, in turn, his career and life trajectory.
Plastic predicament
While studying for two degrees, one in design for technology and the other in Spanish at the University of Otago, Howitt spent a year in Mexico as part of his studies. It was here that the unfortunate surfi ng experience unfolded. Witnessing a place of stunning natural beauty being polluted opened his eyes to the issue.
“I think it was spending a lot of time there, particularly along the beaches on the [Mexican] West Coast, and seeing a lot of pollution,” recalls Howitt. “Not just plastics and waste but runoff and other issues that just meant you could not enjoy being at the beach, and I think that was a real moment for me.”
Upon arriving home, Howitt started to realise that — just like the beach he’d visited in Mexico — his home country might not be as green and clean as some perceive it to be.
Research suggests that Howitt’s concerns are valid. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), New Zealand is regularly one of the worst offenders for waste production per person out of all OECD countries. According to a report by the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, New Zealand has one of the lowest rates in the world for recycling — only 35 per cent of waste is recycled or reused. The rest goes to landfills, where it can end up in waterways and pollute the natural environment.
On the other side of the Tasman Sea, Australia has its own issues with water pollution. The Queen River in Tasmania is so polluted by mining runoff that its orange colour and sludgy appearance has earned it the nickname “pumpkin soup” by many locals. Further north, Forest Lake, an urban reservoir on the outskirts of Brisbane, has high levels of microplastics, according to a study published in the journal Nature in 2023. Researchers examined samples from 38 freshwater lakes from around the world and ranked Forest Lake as the sixth most contaminated of those tested.
Sustainable coastlines
After finishing his studies, Howitt started working at an advertising job in Auckland. Still inspired, he would push for environmental initiatives around the office. Howitt would encourage the team to recycle, championed sustainability policies and put his hand up to be assigned to projects with a sustainability theme.
Howitt’s friend, Sam Judd, was equally concerned by the issue of plastic pollution. Judd had been on the same trip to Mexico and had taken part in beach clean-ups on his own visit to the Galápagos Islands. Determined to find a solution to the problem, Howitt, Judd and their friend James Bailey co-founded and launched Sustainable Coastlines in 2009.
“We saw environmentalism, as it currently was, as something that was really difficult to engage with, because it was always negative, or always seemed negative to us,” says Howitt. “It was about protest and petition, blame and finger pointing, and what we wanted to do is switch that around and take a positive approach.”
The team focused on positive messaging through media, direct education and social media, highlighting wins and success stories, believing this would inspire people more than doom and negativity. “If you can talk about the future we want to see, not the future we don’t, then I think that can be really motivating for people,” says Howitt.
The charity’s first of many environmental events was a clean-up of Great Barrier Island, Aotea, an island located 90km northeast from Auckland. They brought together 700 volunteers for the beach clean-up from schools and the local community. More than 2.8 tonnes of litter was collected over two days, and the event garnered huge media attention.
The work that Sustainable Coastlines did in the early days is still having a big impact today. When Howitt recently revisited a site where the team had planted trees along a riverbank in the Waikato region back in 2010, he was surprised by how much the region and waterway were thriving.
“It was the beginning of a forest,” says Howitt, remembering seeing the scale of the now fully grown trees they’d planted on the riverbank. “It was preventing nutrient runoff into the waterway, and the trees had established great root systems, doing exactly the things we’d want them to do. It was on a scale much bigger than what I thought it would be.
The ripple effect
Howitt realised the impact the work he and his team had done when he was asked to speak at the launch of New Zealand’s ban of single-use plastic shopping bags in 2019.
“At that stage, for a decade, we’d been in schools teaching about plastics, teaching about the importance of avoiding and reducing single-use plastics and not letting them get into the environment, particularly the marine environment,” explains Howitt.
While the team had never suggested to school children that they write to the prime minister, their educational talks had inspired the students so deeply that many of them did. The ripple eff ect of what they learned and the passion it ignited played a role in the government’s decision to ban plastic bags.
“The prime minister — Jacinda Ardern, at the time — said that one of the things that had really inspired her and her team to actually go through with the plastic bag ban was all of these letters they’d been receiving
from school students asking her, heart in hand, to do something about our plastic pollution crisis,” recalls Howitt.
“A lot of them had referenced names of our staff, team members of ours who had been at their schools over the years, speaking about this. [One read] ‘When Oliver came to speak to us about plastic pollution, that really stuck with me, and I wanted to write to you to see if you could do something about it’ … She had this stack of letters from kids and said it motivated her to ban single-use plastic bags, and that was because of our work, our team’s work and the school students that we’d inspired.”
Since then, Sustainable Coastlines has continued its war on single-use plastic. In 2018, Howitt spearheaded the organisation’s launch of Litter Intelligence, New Zealand’s first and only national litter monitoring program. In the ongoing program, fully trained volunteers conduct litter audits at more than 300 beaches nationwide. The data is compiled into reports and used by national, regional, and international agencies to influence future policies, decision-making, and sustainability goals. “Plastic bags have absolutely dropped significantly off the list of worst offenders on the beach, because they’re simply not around,” says Howitt. “That’s because of our work, and the work of many, many others, but we had that influence.”
The business of sustainability
Having made such an impact in his role at Sustainable Coastlines, Howitt started to wonder how else he could make a difference and what other avenues were possible to create meaningful change for the planet. He departed the organisation in 2022, leaving it in the trusted hands of the leadership team, and moved into a new role as a senior manager in the Sustainability, Climate and Nature team at multinational professional services firm PwC NZ.
While Howitt still feels deeply connected to community conservation, moving into the corporate space opened opportunities to drive change at a level, helping corporations to make decisions that would benefit the planet.
“Within the organisation, you get to work with the decision makers from some of the biggest businesses in the country, biggest businesses in the world,” explains Howitt. “So, the chance to work with them to solve some really gnarly, impactful problems that are there at scale — and they need to be solved — you just don’t get to do that type of work in a community conservation group.”
A big part of Howitt’s work has been on The Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TFND), a framework that encourages organisations to consider and integrate nature into decision making, whether that’s operational, strategic, or financial.
“Ultimately, the TNFD aims to shift global financial flows from nature-negative — those that damage and degrade nature — to nature-positive — those that restore and regenerate the environment,” says Howitt.
“Through my work, I’ve helped organisations in the banking, energy, agriculture, infrastructure, and government sectors to deepen their understanding of how they impact nature and how they depend on it for their very survival. This in turn, helps them identify the big changes they need to make to move from business as usual to a world where both business and nature thrive.”
While the challenges differ between the community and corporate space, Howitt feels there are a lot of similarities as well. “I think there’s a sense that, in the business world, it’s all about ‘minds’ and in the community, it’s perhaps all about ‘hearts’,” says Howitt. “And I think that’s probably not quite right. People in business are still humans. A lot of businesses are a big part of the communities they’re in. There’s a win-win opportunity, and an increasing expectation, that they care about looking after these places.”
Be a mosquito
But with all of Howitt’s hard work over the past couple of decades, he also aims to add more work-life balance in the future. Howitt and his partner are planning to take six months off work for an overseas trip this year with their two preschool-aged children. Their destination will bring their environmental journey full circle.
“We’re actually going back to Mexico, where my journey in environmentalism began,” says Howitt. “We’ll spend six months there getting the kids to understand how different world views exist, different languages and cultures exist, and be somewhere where we can spend that time with family.” Despite having his out-of-office on, Howitt doesn’t plan to spend all his time surfing and sunbathing, as he is hoping to volunteer his time towards conservation projects in the local community.
Howitt has dedicated his career to protecting nature. He believes it’s important that everyone knows that their actions count, whether that’s investing in sustainable funds, buying less stuff or getting involved in your local conservation group. This ethos is echoed in one of his all-time favourite quotes, from the Dalai Lama: “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito.”
