Science and water
Management of our freshwater resource is an increasingly complex task and Landcare Research is involved in significant projects with authorities throughout New Zealand to better understand and manage this precious resource.
The complexity and significance of the task is very evident in Canterbury. Environment Canterbury’s (ECan) Chief Executive Bryan Jenkins says water is the dominant economic and environmental issue facing the region.
Canterbury has 70% of New Zealand’s irrigated land and allocates 58% of all of the water allocated in the country. ‘However, we’re also hitting the limits of sustainability levels of supply and we’re getting cumulative effects in terms of its use,’ Dr Jenkins says.
Landcare Research and ECan have been involved in collaborative projects for a long time. Old Problems New Solutions is a four-year innovative research project looking at ways in which scientists from different disciplines – economists, social researchers, hydrologists – can work together with policymakers and stakeholders to enhance the sustainable governance of natural resources.
The research aims to inform decision making for allocation and sustainable management of water resources, including the role of the ‘Māori voice’. More generally, it is developing an integrative framework for analysis of problems related to efficiency, effectiveness, equity, legitimacy and scale. The framework and methods will be applicable to natural resource governance in many sectors and regions of New Zealand.
The research will support development and implementation of new approaches to governance and new ways of working at increasingly complex science–policy interfaces. These new approaches will involve trade-offs within and between social, economic & environmental values and recognition of the uncertainty and dynamics of coupled socioeconomic and biophysical systems. They will also seek to include multiple stakeholder perspectives, among them Māori tikanga.
Dr Jenkins calls this project ‘some of the most cutting edge work’ that’s being undertaken in New Zealand.
The scale of the issues faced in Canterbury make it an ideal location to base the research, as does the willingness of regional and local authorities to engage with the research community in finding solutions.
The issue of water quality in the Rotorua Lakes is also well documented.
‘The essential problem is that we have two large lakes, Rotorua and Rotoiti, that are linked and have big catchments. To improve the quality of their water, over the next 200 years we need to remove approximately 310 tonnes of nitrogen,’ says Kataraina Maki from Environment Bay of Plenty (EBOP).
‘Obviously, there are several ways to do that and we need to be sure that the ways we choose are the best ones.’
A comprehensive review of potential interventions that could be adopted to help address environmental problems was therefore undertaken for EBOP by Suzie Greenhalgh from Landcare Research. Suzie looked at water quality trading, cost sharing, reverse auctions, land stewardship, and land retirement.
Water quality trading or nutrient trading is a market that trades reductions in nutrients. It is premised on the fact that the costs to reduce nutrient losses differ among individual entities depending on their size, scale, location, management. Trading allows sources with high nutrient reduction costs to purchase reductions from sources that have lower reduction costs. Entities with lower reduction costs are economically able to lower their nutrient discharges beyond regulated or permitted levels enabling them to sell their excess reductions to entities with higher costs.
Cost share payments typically cover some or all of the start-up and installation costs of implementing a less polluting practice and are often used to encourage individual nutrient sources to adopt pollution control practices requiring initial capital investment. Like a subsidy, the cost of a nutrient-reducing management practice is shared between a nutrient source (such as a landowner) and government.
Reverse auctions are a mechanism that can be used to cost-effectively allocate funding. They differ from standard auctions in that they have one buyer and many sellers. In reverse auctions, participants have an incentive to reveal the minimum compensation they are willing to accept to adopt or change management practices. Willingness to accept, which only the participant knows, is important information for an administrator of a reverse auction as they want to purchase the most nutrient reductions they can for the available funding. By making selection competitive, producers have an incentive not to inflate their bid price much beyond the mimimum price they are willing to accept as this may lead to their bid being unsuccessful.
Stewardship approaches, such as memorandums of understanding, memorandums of encumbrance or accords, are typically agreements between organisations to undertake a set of specified activities. In this case, they will usually involve agreements to change farm management practices.
Land retirement is where an entire farm or portion of a farm is retired from agricultural use. Dr Greenhalgh and colleagues then assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each intervention as well as their impact, reach and cost-effectiveness.
‘The second thing we did was take this work a bit further by addressing some of the things EBOP would have to consider if or when implementing these potential interventions. We laid out some of the decisions they’d have to make in terms of getting things in place or in the design of the interventions as well as outlining some of the compliance issues they might have to face, the infrastructure they’d need to support the interventions, as well as some of the decisions they’d need to make on an ongoing basis and within any regulatory framework.’
The conclusions were that no single intervention was going to fully solve the problem. Rather, a suite of interventions is likely to be needed to achieve the required reduction in nutrient losses.
The information is now being used to educate councillors, staff and stakeholders as EBOP moves to clean up the lakes, Ms Maki says.
‘I wanted efficient and robust analysis. While plenty of people have opinions, very few people have robust analysis around what options are available and the costs, benefits, efficiency and effectiveness. Landcare Research undertook all that in a robust way and their experiences and skills brought it to life.’