Environmental compliance remains strong, Environment Southland (ES) says.
Integrated catchment management general manager Paul Hulse said more reporting and a general trend of improvement across many environmental measures were features of the 2022-23 Compliance Monitoring Report.
The report provides an overview of ES’ compliance, monitoring and enforcement activities.
All industries within Southland require a range of resource consents to discharge to air, water, coast and land.
The discharges were monitored to ensure compliance with consents and to minimise impacts on the environment.
When action had been needed around consent issues relating to major industries and local authorities, consent-holders had generally been engaged and co-operative and had taken actions or were in the process of remediating the respective situation.
"The team’s aim is to maintain and improve the environmental outcomes associated with the activities we regulate for the sustainable management of Southland’s natural resources in partnership with the community."
ES worked with industries or authorities to ensure spills and discharges were avoided as much as possible, adequately mitigated and resolved, he said.
Amended winter grazing rules also came into effect this year.
"We continued to work with farmers and industry groups to encourage and enable compliance regarding the rules, and to encourage best practice and positive environmental outcomes around the likes of buffers, slopes, and critical source areas."
While ES continued to be pleased with improving winter grazing practices, work had already started on planning for the 2024 season, he said.
During the past year monitoring of industrial and water abstraction consents had increased, and staff had been able to follow up on lower level non-compliance before any issues escalated, he said.
Regulatory committee chairman Neville Cook said an ongoing focus on the 4Es — engage, educate, enable and enforce — was working well across compliance activities.
This year the number of incidents reported to the resource management team increased slightly from the previous year. In the 2022-23 year, there were 1064 incidents compared with the 2021-22 year, which had 880 incidents reported in total.
