A new report warns that intensive dairying and pine tree production will cause increasing environmental damage in New Zealand if action is not taken.
The report by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton found land use changes have been put in the "too hard basket" for too long.
"What we're doing on the land is causing significant environmental damage and there is pressure coming from all quarters," said Upton.
For New Zealand to meet its environmental goals, the way the country views landscapes and uses land must continue to change, and the response needs to be in a way that is "sensitive to the economic, social and cultural viability of our regions", the report said.
A map from the report shows areas with the greatest biodiversity loss, restoration is needed most in the pink and orange places. Another map shows a third of New Zealand's catchments have a high excess of contaminants: blue is sediment, yellow is nitrogen and pink for phosphorus - while maroon, green and orange are a combination of those.
Based on the available data, these catchments are likely to require land use change to achieve their environmental bottom lines, the report found.
"People are going to need to face changes - that requires money. I... don't mean changing the way you do land but actually changing the land use completely," said Upton.
He identifies four critical problems:
- While improved management practices will be enough to meet environmental bottom lines in some places, wholesale land use change will be necessary in others
- Climate change itself will compel land use changes in some regions
- The current policy, regulatory and funding landscape is complex and fragmented
- Many of the environmental impacts of land use are difficult to measure, do not respect property boundaries and make attribution challenging.
Federated Farmers President Wayne Langford is welcoming the report.
"I'm not too worried about land use change, I'm worried about poor policy which pushes that land use change in the direction that's not good for the environment. Farmers need the ability to choose what's best for the land and for the market," said Langford.
The Commissioner's key recommendations are:
- We must take an integrated approach to environmental management that focuses on the catchment rather than one-size-fits-all national regulation. This will make it easier to understand how environmental policies on water, climate, and biodiversity interact.
- We need to rethink the roles of central government, regional councils and communities in decision making and involve catchment groups more in environmental management.
- Central government must enable farmers and regulators to have access to inexpensive, high-quality environmental information and underwrite it as a public good.
- Alternative financial tools can help fund land use transitions. The report discusses examples such as loans and grants, resource rentals on the commercial use of water and pricing biogenic methane emissions.
- The costs of a successful transition would be lower if we removed barriers that are impeding progress, such as, progressively removing forestry from the NZ ETS and creating a separate mechanism (or emissions trading scheme) to manage biogenic methane emissions.
"We... need to work with people on the land being asked to make changes," said Upton.
That's something Langford also wants to see.
"Overall, the initial recommendations are much in line with what Federated Farmers has been saying for some time now," he said.
AgResearch senior scientist Warren King said it's important those catchment groups have the appropriate scope and mandate to co-develop catchment-scale plans, which will make them rather different from the "catchment group" we know today.
"It's a really interesting idea and it will not be easy, that... is quite a bold play," said King.
While the deliberately local focus remains, he said the new catchment groups will sit between national and regional policy frameworks and the private property rights of local landholders.
"Farm boundaries are frequently unhelpful with respect to dealing with environmental issues: externalities do not respect fences."
And he's urging the Government to act on this report within 18 months.
"This is not a problem for the future, this is a problem we are facing right here and right now," said King
The Environment Minister, Simon Watts, told Newshub he has flicked through the report on Wednesday but is not making any commitments just yet.
"In good faith we will be going through that, it does raise a number of aspects we've already signalled in our Coalition agreement," he said.
