Improving water up to community

Ali Timms
Ali Timms
The solution to improving water quality in Southland will only be found if the whole community accepts responsibility and every resident makes changes, Environment Southland chairwoman Ali Timms says.

The second and third parts of a State of the Environment report, focusing on Southland's waterways and the equivalent of a report card on the environment, were released yesterday.

The health of the region's freshwater resources had been a popular topic of conversation for some time, gaining publicity locally and nationally through the issues like those facing the Waituna Lagoon, Ms Timms says in the report's forword.

"The comprehensive report sets a baseline from which we can measure our performance in meeting the targets set in the regional water plan," she said.

"Those targets are to reduce the levels of nitrogen, phosphorus and faecal coliforms, and improve water clarity by at least 10% over the next 10 years."

People living in towns would have to improve the quality of the water going down their drains and farmers would have to accept the way they operated their business had a direct impact on the environment, she said.

The report said there was no doubt that it was the cumulative effects of intensification of land use, seen in the effects of NNN (nitrate-nitrite-nitrogen) increases, the rapid deterioration of the region's estuaries and loss of wetlands that required further action.

The pressures dairy farming had put on freshwater ecosystems in the region had increased markedly since 2001, particularly through effluent disposal and the expansion and intensification of dairying.

There were 838 consents to discharge dairy effluent over 785 farms across Southland as at June 2010.

Over the past three dairy seasons, the number of systems failing inspection has increased. There was a clear trend upwards in significant non-compliant grades, rising from 9.6% in 2007-08 to 14.6% in the 2009-10 dairy season.

At the end of 2009, there were 589,184 dairy cows in the region, compared with 114,378 in 1994.

The herds were farmed on just over 169,000ha. That land area had increased by more than 10,000ha since the 2008-09 season.

DairyNZ water quality specialist Shirley Hayward said the report was overly negative and ignored the fact Southland had "great" freshwater systems and healthy biological communities. She warned some figures used in the report painted an unnecessarily negative picture.

"It could be easy to misread the report and come out with a poor picture of Southland's freshwater systems," she said.

"This picture doesn't match either the individual water quality parameter rankings nor does it match the results of biological monitoring.

Periphyton, fish and macroinverbrate show the majority of those communities are in good to fair condition and there hasn't been any recent changes."

sally.rae@odt.co.nz

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