Regional councils on notice over freshwater management

Wednesday 22nd September 2010 1 Comment

Regional councils are on notice to improve how they manage the country’s freshwater resources, with the release today of the government’s experiment in consensus-making, the final report of the Land and Water Forum.

The product of 18 months’ discussions among more than 50 national organisations representing industrial, municipal, electricity, Maori, farming, conservationist, environmental and recreational groups, the report was unveiled at Parliament at noon today by the Ministers for the Environment, Agriculture and Maori Affairs, Nick Smith, David Carter, and Pita Sharples.

Smith said improving water management was a top priority for the government, and its success relies on agreement at a national level.

“Finding durable solutions to issues of water quality, allocation and storage are essential to a healthy environment and our long-term economic progress,” he said.

“Water is such a complex and polarising issue and to reach agreement is a major achievement.”

Chief among the recommendations from the forum is the establishment of a non-statutory National Land and Water Commission, whose job would be to ensure a national strategy for water management is created to deal with increasingly urgent water quality and allocation issues.

However, the forum stopped short of recommending that all freshwater management be placed in the hands of the newly created Environmental Protection Agency – a solution that had been widely tipped after the Government replaced elected regional councillors of Environment Canterbury because of concerns about over-allocation of Canterbury water resources.

“Central government should establish uniform processes for accounting for spatial variation of water bodies, defining objectives and standards setting, and implementation by regional council,” the forum report recommends.

It leaves open the question of how and to what extent water pricing should be part of the future management system, and proposes a range of approaches that would allow existing water permits to be transferred, split up, and valued, along with considering complex transitional issues that will arise if the reforms go ahead.

A period of public engagement on the report is now proposed, particularly so that the wider memberships of organisations ranging from the Federated Mountain Clubs to Federated Farmers can be informed of the potentially historic consensus achieved by the forum under the leadership of former trade negotiator and diplomat, Alistair Bisley.

At the heart of the report’s recommendations is the need for limits to be set on both water quality and water takes, with proposals to implement an early warning-style system that would allow councils to implement more sophisticated water management methods where allocation or water quality was becoming a problem.

Better and more coordinated national use of existing and new science and knowledge about the country’s water resource, and measurement of outcomes from policy decisions, are also highlighted in the report.

Businesswire.co.nz

Comments from our readers

On 23 September 2010 at 2:05 pm Bill Sutton said:

The Key Government, like the Clarke Government before it, is finding that it much harder to gain consensus support on resource allocation issues than they argued when in opposition.