Gluckman report confirms water quality issues are everybody’s responsibility

Professor Sir Peter Gluckman’s water quality report confirms there are no easy, quick fixes to New Zealand’s water quality challenges and that when it comes to sources of water degradation, all sectors are culpable.

The report, New Zealand’s fresh waters: Values, state, trends and human impacts, rightly identifies that the challenge is balancing the effects of economic development and recreational pursuits on water quality, and the desire of all New Zealanders to look after our waterways.

Eighty percent of New Zealand’s waterways have stable or improving water quality, says Federated Farmers environment spokesperson and national board member Chris Allen.

"Where there are problems all sectors of society, including farmers, are culpable and all sectors of society need to be part of the solutions."

Prof. Gluckman’s report says our fresh water is under pressure from agriculture, hydro power, urban development (pollution from urban stormwater and industrial sources), the presence of introduced species (including didymo and giardia, carp and trout) and climate change.

The findings reinforce Federated Farmers’ long-held view that while our farmers are part of the problem, we are by no means the whole problem, Chris says.

"The farming sector has made significant improvements in recent years to the way we manage our land. I am convinced we can continue to produce food and agricultural exports while reducing our environmental footprint.

"All sectors, including urban communities with sewage and stormwater challenges, need to be given time to implement changes that are sensible, practical and affordable," Chris says.

It is pleasing there are improving trends in phosphate and ammonia levels, which shows the investment that farmers have put into good management practice over the last decade is showing results. Dairy farmers alone have invested over $1 billion dollars in the last five years in environmental improvements on farm.

The conservation vs economic development dilemma also applies to the introduction of "predatory trout", with the report noting "many threatened populations of the endemic non-migratory galaxiid fish populations in New Zealand only exist upstream of natural barriers that exclude predatory trout".

The report states there is a lack of systematic monitoring of river and lake quality indicators yet that is a key to making informed decisions. We need to prioritise the areas that show water quality decline rather than broad brush blunt and unfocused regulation and effort on all areas, when most are not showing an issue.

"Without a focused approach on the 20 per cent of areas where we have issues from industry, urban and rural pressures, we will not achieve meaningful improvements," Chris says.

Also highlighted in the report is a new approach that is emerging in Canterbury called Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR). This is where the large, mountain catchment braided rivers are being carefully utilised for their plentiful supplies of fresh clean water to improve the water quality in Canterbury aquifers and lowland steams such as the Selwyn that naturally run dry in the summer.

ENDS

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