Freshwater reforms reveal difficulty in science-driven policy, report says

Thursday, 18 August 2022

Water is the source of life on Earth, so why are we poisoning it?

An ambition to reverse decades of declining freshwater quality was meant to put science at the heart of government policy. The result was more complicated. National Correspondent Charlie Mitchell explains.

For freshwater scientists, it’s long been the holy grail: Strict rules that would reverse the ongoing decline in freshwater quality.

When a Labour-led Government came to power in 2017, promising to put such rules in place, they were optimistic it would finally happen.

Although the resulting reforms, passed in 2020, were widely seen as a step forward, they were not the rescue plan some had hoped for.

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A new report, paid for by the state-funded ‘Our Land and Water’ group and undertaken by the Environmental Defence Society (EDS), gives a behind-the-scenes look at how the policy process played out and why the end result fell short of expectations.

It included interviews with 35 people directly involved in the process, including scientists and government officials.

The short answer? Timing and politics. But the role of science in shaping the policy was complicated and shows that science and policy are not always aligned.

Why were some people disappointed?

To fix water quality, you have to deal with nutrients.

Nutrients are natural parts of the ecosystem that become pollutants at high levels. The main ones are nitrogen and phosphorus.

The proposed way of dealing with nutrients was through national bottom lines, which set the maximum amount of individual nutrients allowed in a river (think of a speed limit).

To advise on this and other policy matters, the Government assembled 19 freshwater scientists. Called the Science and Technical Advisory Group (STAG), its job was to provide the scientific basis for the reforms; the scientists were not allowed to consider economic impacts and did not have to agree unanimously.

During the policy process, it became clear that most of the STAG favoured a nitrogen bottom line of 1mg/L. It would be a stark reduction in the existing bottom line, which had been 6.9mg/L.

It proved contentious. Nitrogen has always been a political football. In rural areas, it mostly originates from cow urine (and to a lesser extent, directly from fertiliser), meaning it can be used as a proxy for agricultural pollution.

A polluted river in South Canterbury, photographed in 2021.

Reducing nitrogen levels to 1mg/l in some regions would require large-scale land-use change, and make dairy farming unviable in some cases.

The 1mg/L bottom line was supported by most of the Government’s panel of experts, the Ministry for the Environment (MfE), and several external science groups. It was opposed by farming industry groups, regional councils, and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI).

But when the final policy was announced, the 1mg/L figure – which had been part of the proposed rules put out for public consultation – was nowhere to be found. It had been dropped.

At the time, several STAG members told Stuff its absence undermined the reforms entirely.

Professor Russell Death, a freshwater ecologist at Massey University, said about the final policy: “I don't think it does anything. They might as well not have put it out.” Dr Adam Canning, another freshwater scientist, gave it a ‘D’ grade, and criticised the decision to leave out the nitrogen bottom line.

Why did this happen?

The EDS report examined the nitrogen decision in detail. How did a policy supported by a large majority of the experts fail to make the grade, when so many others did?

One factor, the report concluded, was pushback from outside groups. The nitrogen proposal was vehemently opposed by the agricultural industry, which criticised it in exhaustive detail.

The agricultural industry had broad support from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), which was assisting MfE in developing the policy.

Despite the influence of science in developing the policy, measures that came with an economic cost – such as the nitrogen bottom-line – were subject to a much higher level of scrutiny, says Dr Deidre Koolen-Bourke, a senior policy researcher at the EDS who co-authored the report.

“The number of cost/benefit analyses that policy has to go through means it's really, really hard to get anything passed that has significant costs attached.”

It was a recurring feature of the policy process. While the policies were being worked through, it was revealed that MfE officials had been meeting with groups outside the formal policy process. They included at least a dozen meetings with members of the agricultural sector (informal meetings were also held with iwi and environmental groups).

News of those meetings only emerged after a leaked email showed MfE was outlining to the industry groups the policies it was considering. Conspicuously absent was a nitrogen bottom line – at that point, the scientists had not yet made their final recommendations but had agreed to that policy in principle.

Instead, officials were suggesting a different system for managing nitrogen, one unlikely to gain the support of the scientists. In an email a week before the document was leaked, a ministry official had even asked one industry group to help draft the scope of work for that system.

After the leak, further meetings with the sector were cancelled and MfE apologised, at the time noting that wider consultation was normal practice.

“It was clear that certain industry groups felt that they had the pen in their hand and that they were helping writing the policy,” Koolen-Bourke says.

The Manawatū River where it flows through Palmerston North.

“[The meetings] eroded trust for everybody working within the formal policy process, which was trying to be very open and put everything down on paper. And I think it erodes public trust as well.”

If the informal meetings were open and their contents transparently communicated, there would have been less controversy, she says. “It’s the secrecy that undermines trust.”

In the end, the meetings did not appear to affect MfE’s views. The agency’s final recommendation was similar to that of the STAG, and included the nitrogen bottom line.

Koolen-Bourke put that down to the close link between MfE officials and the scientists. Staff were present at meetings, and listened to the discussions among the scientists. It was one of the major successes of the process.

“They were able to be in the room with the scientists and to actually hear the debate and the discussions,” she says.

“I think it really deepened their understanding of the complexity of it and the risks. I don’t think the scientists always wanted them in the room, but for MfE, it’s what helped get that really high degree of alignment.”

Disagreement

While the STAG members agreed on nearly everything, it was the nitrogen question that exposed some division.

By the final report, 14 of the 19 members supported the 1mg/L bottom line. Five dissented, most of whom said they did not believe the data was sufficient to justify the limit. Three were scientists at Niwa.

Part of the explanation, the EDS report concludes, is the different backgrounds of the scientists. Some were in academia and had a clear view of the recent science, while others had closer links to local authorities and would have been mindful of the difficulties in implementing policy.

While the diversity of views made for robust discussion, it – alongside the historical difficulties in accessing and using reliable data – increased the amount of scientific uncertainty, which government and agency officials were not always well-equipped to manage.

In the end, it appeared a mixture of economic considerations, scientific uncertainty, and the looming Covid-19 response was responsible for the nitrogen limit not passing muster, the report concludes.

Several of the dissenting scientists told the report’s authors that, given more time, there may have been agreement. It suggested that the quick policy process – moulded to fit election cycles and political momentum – was not a suitable environment for robust, science-driven policy, Koolen-Bourke says.

“The certainty issue seemed like a big barrier that just needed more time.

“I think there was a bit of frustration around the speed of the process, and the adequacy of the data that was there which kind of undermined the ability to get agreement in more detail.”

Although there were flaws, the process was a significant improvement on previous attempts at freshwater reform. The role scientists played was valuable, and there was a high degree of integration with officials, which was reflected in their advice.

Rules around nitrogen did change – the existing 6.9mg/L limit for nitrate toxicity was lowered to 2.4mg/L, giving more protection to aquatic life from the direct effects of toxicity (but not the impacts of nitrogen on broader ecosystem health).

A concept called Te Mana o Te Wai, which existed in previous freshwater rules, was strengthened. Local authorities must now consider the health of freshwater first, before economic and social needs. It has already changed how some communities approach water management.

The new standards also introduced stronger protections for wetlands and requirements for monitoring and reporting freshwater quality. It will take several years before the impact of all of this can be measured.

In the future, there should be a greater focus on policy implementation, which was a notable gap in this case, Koolen-Bourke says.

Broadly, there needed to be more support for building a scientific basis in policy – gathering data, supporting the scientists involved in policy, and being less constrained by the electoral cycle and regulatory measures that focus on economic costs over sustainability.

“It leaves a lot of questions. If our monitoring systems and the science funding framework had been better, if there was a lot more data available and there was more time, and if systems support processes had been in place, would we have been able to make even more progress?” Koolen-Bourke says.

“By the time these processes get up and running … there’s only about 18 months for what can be a really huge workload. None of the scientists are paid for that work – they do it out of the goodness of their hearts, really. We wouldn’t treat economists, or the legal advice, like that.”