Catchment groups can heal our rivers, but they need the right support

Jim Sinner is a senior scientist at Cawthron Institute in Nelson. He and his colleagues have just released a report, Where next for catchment groups?

OPINION: Catchment groups are New Zealand’s best opportunity in a generation to finally make progress on healing our waterways, but the groups and the agencies supporting them need to refocus if that opportunity is to be realised.

For over 25 years, New Zealanders have consistently rated unhealthy waterways as one of their top environmental concerns. The government has responded with research, voluntary accords, the collaborative Land and Water Forum and, since 2011, increasing regulation of farming practices that has prompted backlash and resistance from many farmers.

The result? There is improvement in some water-quality attributes like dissolved phosphorus and water clarity, but indicators of river health, like the macroinvertebrate community index, show that more rivers are declining than improving and that more work needs to be done.

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Meanwhile, climate change threatens to add more sediment to waterways and make farming more precarious financially and emotionally.

Amidst this gloom, farmer-led catchment groups provide a glimmer of hope for addressing the cumulative effects flowing from multiple properties.

Over the past decade, catchment groups have been established up and down the country as farmers have reacted to public pressure about unhealthy waterways and regulation of farming practices.

Catchment groups are doing their own monitoring, getting expert advice, publicising fencing and planting work, and forming relationships with councils, schools and local marae.

Most groups get by on the smell of an oily rag, though a handful of groups have received large sums for pest control and riparian planting from the Government’s Jobs for Nature programme.

Yet few catchment groups have identified specific freshwater objectives or are implementing a science-driven catchment plan that will achieve agreed environmental standards.

If farmers are upset about increasing regulation, why aren’t catchment groups focused on achieving the water-quality standards the public uses to gauge farmers’ environmental performance?

Through our research – involving in-depth discussions with farmers, tangata whenua leaders and policy advisers – we’ve discovered there are important differences in what catchment groups and government officials think catchment groups should do.

Policy advisers and researchers, including ourselves, have expected catchment groups to organise land users to help deliver freshwater policy objectives in their catchment. In this “management logic”, we expect catchment groups to develop and implement detailed plans to achieve specific policy objectives, in order to avoid further regulation.

According to this logic, land users can use peer pressure and positive reinforcement to achieve compliance more effectively than regional councils.

Local farming leaders see catchment groups differently. They want to lead by example, not tell others what to do. They are motivated more by local relationships and community concerns than by policy objectives and water-quality jargon.

Farmers want to show they care about the environment and they are already investing substantial time and money to make things better. This is welcome, but if catchment groups don’t address freshwater problems directly and convincingly, the Government will respond with more regulation.

If that happens, catchment groups will become more reluctant to develop their own solutions because these would be on top of what the Government is requiring them to do.

In some places, this stalemate seems to have already occurred – catchment groups are just complying with requirements rather than formulating plans to achieve the freshwater outcomes.

We need to reverse this vicious circle and turn it into a cycle of positive reinforcement. Catchment groups, government and regional councils all have roles to play in this.

First, we need to recognise that strong, positive relationships involving tangata whenua and the wider community are essential to motivate and support catchment groups. Building and maintaining these relationships takes time and resources – it cannot and should not be taken for granted.

Government and regional councils should financially support catchment group co-ordination roles to strengthen relationships, and should support tangata whenua to enable their participation as well. And government should reward groups that are implementing credible plans to achieve policy outcomes, by reducing regulation of individual farming practices in those catchments.

For their part, catchment groups, including tangata whenua and other local partners, should adopt measurable objectives consistent with freshwater policy, implement a plan for achieving these objectives and regularly report on progress to their communities.

Small steps can build confidence and lead to bigger and better things. By building stronger relationships and focusing on delivering the freshwater outcomes their communities care about, catchment groups can help to rebuild the social licence of farming and give the Government the confidence to regulate less, not more