The Canterbury Water Management Strategy released today presents the potential of a win/win way forward.
It has a balanced approach to environmental and economic outcomes. I take my hat off to strategy chair Bede O’Malley and the other members of the strategy team. They have worked collaboratively and delivered a visionary statement which acknowledges that past practices have been damaging and the first thing that must happen is to begin to restore the quality of Canterbury’s waterways. Any further applications for harnessing water deserve the same collaborative, community-driven approach.
Just yesterday I visited the Opuha Dam in South Canterbury which is a good example of a community-initiated water scheme that almost everyone supports and benefits from.
That said, we would want to ensure that the strategy’s ten proposed new water zones all work to regional criteria, have broad community and stakeholder representation and meet or exceed national minimum water and environmental standards.
We do need to be wary of having too many layers of administration. Not only would there be 10 zone committees, a Regional Water Management Committee and Ecan – there is also the Government’s proposal for an Environmental Protection Agency.
But these are details to be worked through. It’s great that Canterbury stakeholders from environmental groups, the Feds, councils and others have developed a strategy with broad support which provides the capacity to improve our waterways and deliver sustainable growth into our future.
Brendon, I agree with the majority of your endorsement of the CWMS. In all of its stages it has encouraged some very productive discussion and debate between all those interested in improving water management and developing water storage in Canterbury. Having said that, I don’t agree with your general statement that the current system has all been damaging and the inference that restorative work must happen before we can start developing the water infrastructure that Canterbury desperately needs.I believe infrastructure development can progress hand in hand with restorative programs where they are neede.
I’m often witness to a reluctance from local, regional , and central government to acknowledge just how quickly the agricultural community has responded to water quality issues, i.e nutrient budgeting, fencing of waterways, riparian plantings etc. And in much of this work Canterbury is actually far more proactive than other parts of the country. Irrigated intensive farming has been practised in Canterbury for decades now and much of that land has long since proven that this style of farming is sustainable.
To realise the objectives this strategy aspires to will require those in positions like yours to genuinely recognise the place that Irrigation has had in the wealth of a regional economy like Canterbury, and also acknowledge that not all practises currently used are ineffective or damaging just because they have been around for a while. We’ve irrigated for close to fifty years and our soils and waterways are as good as they ever have been. The old adage ” Its easier to be green when your in the black ” seems appropriate. I hope developing water storage in this country in the areas that need it can become an issue where politicians at all levels work together to make it happen.
Canterbury needed something like this… How foolish we would have looked (or will look) if in 20 years Christchurch resident had shower restrictions… A couple of hundred kilometres from Fiordland…
What a shocking document the Canterbury “water strategy” is -a river engineer’s wet dream, as it would be, because it was largely drafted by irrigation consultants Aqualink. It identifies nearly every major waterway in Canterbury as a posiblity for damming, diverting or extracting water for industrial farming, most of which will be dairying. This is about farming greed.
Christchurch water is not currently under threat, there is plenty of it and it is clean. But what happens to the aquifer recharge system when major waterways are plundered? The aquifers are not all recharged from rainfall, a lot of it comes from underground leakage (osmosis) from rivers. Then there’s the nitrate issue and of course animal emissions that are destroying the planet’s atmosphere.
What does irrigation enthusiast Bede O’Malley mean by repairing environmental degradation – a few flaxes planted to hide the shrinking trickles of water down our degraded braided rivers? What a joke. How will he fix the decades of agricultural poisons spreading plumes underground. And now we’ll accellerate it. You can’t dam, divert and extract water and pretend you are improving the environment at the same time. It’s just a big lie!
Throughout history, many civic leaders have thought that by collaborating with authorities they could ameliorate the worst but they were just swept away too. Our envionmental guardians appear to have been captured by this Trojan Horse called a “water strategy”.
And what a bureacrat’s dream – 10 zone water management committees, a regional water management committee, a national tripartite forum, a water executive, a local authority enterprise to design, fund and build irrigation schemes, special legislation etc etc.
One arm of this many-tentacled beast will help irrigators sugar coat their resource consent applications while another arm is busy funding it – what a conflict of interst!!
And who is going to pay for all this – most likely mug Christchurch ratepayers who can then enjoy the warm effluent laden trick down.
We should reject these environmental plunderers out of hand because they will never be happy until they have tamed, dammed, diverted and extracted every drop of water so that none runs out to sea (such a waste).
The braided rivers of Canterbury created the plains that sustain our life. Now we wish to thank nature by screwing as many of them a we can.
Our only hope is that no government is ever going to blow the multi millions required for this sop to the farming vote. Meanwhile, the cynics in Wellington are happy to let the locals play their little games and pat them on the head when they come up with the right-sounding answer.
yours in disgust
Waterboy, don’t know what it was like 50 years ago but you can no longer safely swim in any Canty lowland stream, so that’s hardly an acknowledgement that all is well. Meantime, Save Our Rivers thinks the strategy has been written by irrigation consultants. Er, how did they manage to convince people like the Water Rights Trust, Fish and Game and Eugenie Sage to support the strategy? It won’t be perfect and commitment to improve current waterways and ensure new water is used sustainably will need to be watched, but hey, this has the potential to work. it doesn’t mean damming every or even any river. Ophua created a reliable water source and maintains flows all year round. There’s a good template.
CWMS – another acronym to add to the pile. Ecan and the CPWA have already shown us what dangerous acronyms can do to our rights regarding maintaining a supply of fresh water.
Some years ago the Penatgon released a document outlining how the wars of the future would be over resources and not ideology. The water the Canterbury has could last a 1,000 generations if managed properly. Alternatively it could be squandered in one for some quick cash.
I’m sorry Brendon but I’m highly skeptical.
Brendon, if your yearning for a swim in an icy cold (even in mid summer) lowland stream that is in excellent condition, full of fish and guaranteed to do nothing more to your health than shrink a few body parts, then give me a shout.I have several on the property and Ecan testing verifies their condition, and they flow through kilometres of intensively farmed land. I acknowledge there are some waterways in Canterbury with issues, all I ask of someone in your position is don’t overdo the hyperbole.The whole lowland stream ecosystem is not under the pressure you would have us believe. As for save our rivers, what a load of alarmist claptrap! I’m not overtly green but I look after my patch pretty well. I’ve grown up beside, swam in , tickled trout , caught eels, cockabullies, frogs in these lowland streams and my children continue to do these things today. Tell you what SOR,I wouldn’t let my kids near the Avon. Who polluted that one?!! I can ensure you , having been involved in certain stages of this strategy, that the environmental groups have had just about everything they wanted in this document included. Or should I qualify that, the environmental groups that are actually prepared to sit down and discuss the genuine issues involved have. I kind of get the feeling you’re not keen on doing that SOR. Can’t please them all.
This strategy is a big ask, but if we can find the right formula and apply it well we will all be better off.
The CWMS bureaucracy does look cumbersome, to say the least.
Maybe with the Auckland local authority reorganization now well down the track, it is time to look at the ‘One Council for Canterbury’ (Clarence to Waitaki) again.
That would at least get rid of some of the current grandstanding and petty squabbles, and bring ECan, ChCh City and all those 10 or so district councils into one body with real clout.
To get back to water, if quality rather than allocation is the primary issue then clearly this is an indictment of ECan, at present of course in some disarray. More work and time will fix this, though, even with ECan unchanged.
As far as allocation goes, the benefits of irrigation are undoubted. The questions always are – who pays and who benefits? There needs to be more transparency about process and funding, and whether some super-body would address these better is doubtful.
To get specific – Central Plains has been turned down after exhaustive hearings and surprisingly little regret or recrimination. Chertsey Barrhill has been on the books for 40 years, and farmers have again recently voted against it.
The Hurunui scheme at 40k hectares looks like about 300 farmers * 130 hectares each. Have these farmers yet paid even $10k each for the process so far, let alone the $10k per hectare they will need to stump up for dairy development?
Only the primary reason for the Hurunui dam – power generation – can meet the capital costs. Irrigation, as with Opuha, is almost incidental. At current payouts, dairy is hardly the most attractive land use option, yet what else is available?
A close look at existing water use in Canterbury would show up those wasteful open stockwater races, which deliver only 5% of the intake water to the animals, and might irrigate up to 10 000 hectares if piped, by themselves. Maybe start there.
There seems to be universal acclamation for the CWMS, but it could be that it will fall far short of everyone’s expectations.
The draft CWMS provides a reality check on any “river engineer’s wet dream” with its summary of biodiversity and cultural values and the impacts of current uses. Nitrate modelling for the Strategy highlights the risk of nitrate contamination of shallow groundwater if land use intensification occurs without changes in practices to reduce nutrient leaching.
As the document (p14)notes in relation to the infrastructure projects “these projects have yet to receive detailed assessments for consistency with the fundamental principles and the targets, and this may rule them out or significantly reduce their benefits from a purely water-use perspective.”
Working group discussion at the third stage of the CWMS noted the impacts of diverting water from the South Branch of the Ashburton River for the proposed Stour scheme. The Stour is now off the short-list. Others may fail or be radically reworked.
Public submissions overwhelmingly rejected the current adversarial approach of the RMA. The proposed zone committees, and regional committee are places for discussion to decide if and where there is common ground about the scale, location, and type of development and priorities for environmental restoration. How else could or should this be done ?
Without a strategic approach, ad hoc irrigation proposals will continue to tie up huge amounts of time, money and people energy.**
Much about the proposed governance structure and how it would work and mesh with RMA requirements has yet to be resolved. The draft CWMS notes some of the risks. Idea on how these could be avoided or reduced, or an alternative model would usefully contribute to the public debate.
**Red Rosa is incorrect. While Commissioners have indicated that the CPW reservoir will not be approved, hearings continue on CPW’s revised proposal including a 25 cumec take from the Waimakariri River.