Connecting land & water — a fresh start?
Andrew Fenemor
Fresh water provides New Zealand’s $25 billion a year primary production with its competitive advantage and is pivotal to our clean, green brand and $8 billion a year tourism industry. But fresh water is more than an economic resource. It supports social, cultural and recreational values as well - and therein lies a tension.
There are multiple uses for water, which can cause conflict as illustrated by recent headlines in Canterbury, Waikato and the Manawatu. These conflicts are symptomatic of the difficulties engaging with the wide range of stakeholders, resolving multiple competing values or agreeing on shared regional and catchment outcomes. Because of this, it has been hard to set or manage consistent or effective limits, with many organisations responsible for coordinating and managing aspects of water and the critical land use activities that impact on demand and quality.
In 2009 the Government established the Land & Water Forum, representing more than 58 participating organisations, to address some of these issues. The 53 recommendations of the Land and Water Forum, released in a report commissioned by the Minister for the Environment, highlighted the importance of putting into practice better integrated and collaborative approaches to managing landscapes at catchment scale.
It is timely, therefore, to look back on the achievements of our Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) research programme, which focused on the same principles of integration and collaboration at the catchment scale as a way of addressing natural resource issues.
The programme extended over a 10-year period (2000–2010), with the duration and level of funding (provided by the Foundation for Research, Science & Technology) allowing the research team to undertake work that was innovative and of international significance. While Landcare Research has led the research, the ICM programme has been a collaborative partnership with the Cawthron Institute and Tasman District Council with NIWA, GNS, Scion, NZ Landcare Trust, Te Tau Ihu iwi and many stakeholder sectors and individuals. The ICM programme used a place-based approach focusing on the Motueka catchment, extending into Tasman Bay, as the primary demonstration basin. Social research and collaborative learning techniques were used to effectively partner with stakeholders at multiple scales: from regional council (e.g. policy), to sub-catchment communities (e.g. farmers) to sectors (e.g. marine farming), and to incorporate them into the research (a transdisciplinary approach). The programme also took an integrated approach, knitting together research on biophysical processes (water, sediment, nutrient and contaminant fluxes across land and water) with research on social processes (social learning, community engagement, and Māori values).
A review panel of international science experts and national stakeholders recently assessed the achievements and future relevance of the ICM research for the Foundation for Research, Science & Technology and Landcare Research. Stakeholders interviewed for the review highlighted the programme as ‘a good example of how to design and undertake an integrative research programme at multiple scales for land–water–coastal management’, and said it ‘reinforced the value of the ICM approach for other councils giving them confidence to use similar approaches’. The challenges and successes of the ICM programme have helped inform future research in a number of associated science areas, including:
Advancing transdisciplinary and integrated science – including engaging with stakeholders to elicit and link values and outcomes and identifying the causal relationship between land use and water management
Building functional collaborative teams – including working across institutions and disciplines. Collectively this work is demonstrating ways to support collaborative adaptive management approaches towards catchments and other natural resource areas.
Technology and knowledge transfer – including novel methods for partnering, extension and brokering.
Knowledge advancement in specific research areas – including sediment processes, microbial tracking, river health assessment, land use impacts, integrated and futures modelling, and collaborative learning.
In this edition of Discovery we report on some of the major issues affecting New Zealand’s land and water resources and how we have focused our research to address them. More details can be found on the programme website.
Warren Parker
Chief Executive
Andrew Fenemor
ICM Programme Leader
Alison Collins
Science Team Leader