The tab for decades of water mismanagement is falling due

Thursday, 5 September 2019

OPINION: If you woke up from a long coma and tried to catch up with New Zealand's water quality debate, you might wonder how it came to this.

Significantly improving water quality has been one of the most intractable political problems of the past decade, despite these fundamental truths. Opinion polling consistently shows a strong public mandate for reform; There are well-established scientific standards for what a healthy waterway looks like; And the causes of freshwater pollution, both urban and rural, are well known.

So why has it taken so long?

The quick answer is short-sightedness. But the longer – and only slightly more nuanced – answer is that everyone with the power to do something about it has been kicking the can down the road for decades, passively watching the problem get worse, which has allowed a smash-and-grab on the environment at the expense of future generations of farmers and ratepayers.

* Fresh start for water quality standards

The Mataura river in Southland, which has long been one of the country's most polluted rivers.

* Otago Regional Council's ability to manage fresh water criticised

* Political parties sense opportunity on water issues

* ECan has 'significant concerns' with Govt proposal to clean up lakes Ellesmere and Forsyth sooner**

The significance of the proposals announced on Thursday - particularly the recommended national bottom lines around nutrients - cannot be overstated, and will be met with huge backlash from some quarters. But they are an inevitable response to decades of inaction.

These bottom lines are largely the same as those recommended by the group of freshwater scientists consulted by the Government. That they seem severe shows just how divorced freshwater policy has been from science until now.

Let's go back a couple of decades.

Long before there were national bottom lines for water quality in New Zealand, there were the Australian and New Zealand Guidelines for Fresh and Marine Water Quality (usually known as ANZECC).

These guidelines, which were calculated through a rigorous scientific process, broadly show the point at which waterways become affected by pollution. The guidelines are not legally binding, and don't apply perfectly to every river, but they give a useful indication of what a healthy river should look like.

Environment Minister David Parker and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

The earlier limits set by politicians look nothing like these science-based guidelines.

The ANZECC guideline for total nitrogen, for example, is around 0.61mg/L; the equivalent bottom line proposed on Thursday (for the only slightly different variable dissolved inorganic nitrogen) is 1mg/L, more than 60 per cent higher. The new proposed bottom line for phosphorus, 0.018mg/L, is 80 per cent above the guideline value.

The government's proposed limits are radical, in a way, but only because the old bottom lines were so high as to be worthless.

A recent petrochemical spill on the Avon River in Christchurch.

For nitrogen, the bottom line was 6.9mg/L - the point at which nitrogen is toxic, a bar that nearly every river in the country passed.

Dr Russell Death, a freshwater ecologist, once likened this to setting the drink driving limit at the point where alcohol becomes toxic in the bloodstream; you'd be free to cause drunken carnage on the road, as long as you stopped short of dying from alcohol poisoning.

To take this analogy further, the proposed new limits would be like taking this toxicity-based drink-driving limit and replacing it with a much lower one that's still nearly double the level at which your driving ability is impaired.

Mt Taranaki as seen from the picturesque Stoney River.

This is not the fault of any one government. Although these limits were passed by the National government, prior to that, there were no national limits at all.

Water quality could have been sorted out many years ago, before it got to the point where it required such a brutal corrective. The legislative tools to improve water quality have existed for nearly 30 years: The Resource Management Act (RMA), passed in 1991, makes it clear that councils should not pass standards that would allow water quality to decline, which has clearly happened in some places.

It took two decades for the first National Policy Statement (NPS) for freshwater to come around, which didn't even include bottom lines for nutrients, which were added in 2014 and revised again in 2017. Even now, the NPS only includes a handful of the dozens of contaminants that can affect water quality.

Throughout this period, there was clear evidence that freshwater was in trouble, but no-one wanted to face the consequences that would come with setting limits. When limits were set, they were set so low they were ineffective; when those limits were breached, there were few apparent consequences.

This refusal to say no, the disinterest in trying to prevent pollution from happening in the first place, has led us to blow past nearly every marker of ecosystem health in our waterways.

In pastoral areas, 86 per cent of rivers exceed the ANZECC guideline value for nitrogen and 90 per cent exceed it for phosphorus. The figures are worse for urban rivers.

About 82 per cent of rivers in pastoral areas, and 94 per cent in urban areas, breach the human health for recreation standard based on E. coli, meaning they are unsuitable for activities such as swimming. Nearly half of the more than 300 wastewater treatment plants across our cities and towns discharge directly into freshwater, and nearly all of those that do breach the current NPS at the point of discharge.

Several regional councils have not even started creating freshwater plans that 'give effect' to the existing NPS, and none are on track to fully implement their plans within the next five years.

Degraded water quality, which the public says is its most important environmental issue, was the inevitable consequence of every level of government deciding they were unaccountable for what was happening.

There are too many examples to list of governing bodies running from this responsibility.

After passing a water quality plan in 2014, Horizons Regional Council in Manawatū-Whanganui decided to ignore it when it became clear land use would have to change, and some farms would not get consent. Its refusal to enforce its own plan ended up in the Environment Court; when it was told it had to follow its own rules, the council decided it would rather set up new ones.

In Waikato this year, about 100 dairy farms were significantly non-compliant with effluent management rules, and only 21 per cent of all dairy farms were fully compliant. Those rules were established more than a decade ago - the council was said to find the level of non-conpliance 'concerning', but has done little to stop it from happening. The Queenstown-Lakes District Council, ostensibly fed up with being penalised for its wastewater overflows into pristine lakes, has simply asked for permission to keep doing it. ECan has proposed a plan change that would allow average nitrate levels in Christchurch city's drinking water to rise to 3.8 mg/L in the future, despite uncertainty about the long-term health impacts of nitrate consumption.

If the coalition Government enacts the more ambitious of its proposals, it will undoubtedly face a backlash from agricultural lobby groups and the industry's supporters in Parliament and among the pundit class.

These people will, of course, never acknowledge their own complicity in this state of affairs.

They won't reflect on how they lobbied to continue business-as-usual practices, to self-regulate, despite clear evidence that the drive to increase agricultural productivity was damaging the environment we all share, and attempts to rein it in were nowhere near enough. They will not question why they fought oversight that would have eased the transition to better water quality, in a way that would have elevated the best farmers and cut loose the worst, rewarded the councils that responsibly dealt with their wastewater and punished the ones that refused.

They will not wonder why, after throwing this boomerang into the horizon, they had no plan for what to do once it inevitably came swinging back.

The burden of these stricter rules will fall onto the future generation of farmers and ratepayers, who did not cause the environmental issues the rules intend to address. It is no wonder that young farmers question their future in the industry, given the tight environmental constraints they will have to work under, in what will already be dubious economic conditions.

The short-sightedness by central government, local government, and agricultural lobbyists in defending the status quo made this regulation inevitable. Some will undermine it however they can, but it will likely receive public support, because this is exactly what the public has been asking for, and what needed to happen.

At some point, someone had to pick up the tab for the mismanagement of freshwater. And as is too often the case, many of those responsible are already leaving the bar.