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Winter 2014
6
Look to Europe for pollution solution
ASKING QUESTIONS: Professor Alexander Gillespie says Europe has some of the overseas answers to
reducing water pollution.
ENVIRONMENTAL law has been around since the
1840s so the current debate around water pollution
is nothing new, leading Waikato University Law
Professor Al Gillespie says.
“The only thing that has changed in the debate is
the type of pollution. We go initially from something
like sewage in the 19th century, to industrial
pollution and contaminants in the 20th century. In
the middle of the 20th century we moved to specific
pollutants like heavy metals and oil and then we come
to the fourth pollutant today, which is agricultural
pollution,” he says.
Agricultural pollution of water is now the primary
source of pollution for the OECD, he says, and
Europe is the only place where it is tracking down.
“All other parts of the OECD are tracking up
on agricultural pollution. So the question to me as a
lawyer and someone who likes policy, is how did they
do that? How have the Europeans started to crack this
problem when the rest of the OECD, including us, is
going in the other direction?”
Professor Gillespie says the answer involves
four steps.
“Your first step is in science. You have to get the
scientific equation correct at the beginning,” he says.
That involves having the right processes and asking
the right questions.
“The process is everything. It has to be
transparent, it has to be inclusive. You’ve got to make
sure that no one agency captures the scientific debate
and you must have peer review.”
Then “you’ve got to ask the right questions.
You’ve got to say, which pollutants are they?
Is it nitrates, is it phosphorous, is it sediment? Ask the
right questions and you will get the right answers.”
Professor Gillespie says alongside this, independent
studies of the economics, technology and social
science should be carried out.
The next step is policy development and
“sometimes environmental matters are so big
they cannot be placed within a generic piece of
legislation so the law should be an independent piece
of legislation”.
Then comes identifying the polluter and the
fourth step is making the polluter pay.
“If you identify the polluter the polluter will stop
because they don’t like the shame aspect and at some
point they must be made to bear the cost of what
they’re doing.”
Professor Gillespie says the Europeans took more
than 20 years to develop a law in nitrates. “They
worked out very simply that the standards had to be
the same, there was no flexibility across Europe.” They
identified nitrate vulnerable zones and put limits on
how much nitrate could go into the waterways and
into the land.
“They set a robust standard that applied for
everywhere that was considered vulnerable. As it
stands now, over 40% of Europe is now recognised as
a nitrate vulnerable zone,” he says.
As a final step, Professor Gillespie says the
pollution should be made public.
“You’ve got to make it public. The way that
we think, the way that we respond is that if people
know what’s going on in a rational, democratic,
robust society, they will bring the pressure onto
the polluter.”
Many non-governmental organisations help
this process. “They go around and they say okay,
not only can you not swim in this area, this is
the source of the pollution, and this is where it
came from. And they have found that
very
quickly,
especially
in
the
local
context,
people
change.
People
change
their behaviour.”
There will be fewer inputs to the water
system, more people wanting to draw on the
system, increased diffused pollution from
runoff and growing pressure to have clean
water in watercourses.
Surface flooding events will increase and “if
we’ve bought into this supply side logic, we’re
going to need more drains.
"We’re going to need more infrastructure
and more flood defences to protect us as well.
It’s a very costly model to continue.”
Professor White says there are several
ways to respond to the challenge of
water management, including having
more water-sensitive buildings and cities.
“It is completely feasible to have a zero
runoff policy on buildings,” he says.
The
typical
larger
sections
in
New Zealand – compared to Europe – offered
opportunities to manage water on site.
“So you can retain water to stop it
contributing to peak flows, to stop it
Fresh thinking needed on water management
From page 1
contributing towards diffused pollution.
And then you can also reuse that water for
watering your plants or reducing your water
bill or reducing the need to buy water in
from elsewhere.
“If you think about it, we actually have
good water on site that we drain to the river
and then we use drinking quality water
transported from far away to flush our toilets,
to wash our cars.”
At the city level, planning could provide for
better answers to water management.
For example areas of green infrastructure
that can store water at times of high
rainfall or remove the pollution before
we allow it to drain to the rivers.
“Society has created a logic for water
management which has been remarkably
resistant to change. We improve it with
technology but we don’t necessarily take a step
back and look at the bigger picture about how
we should manage water in New Zealand.
“We’ve never known as much about water
as we do now. We just need to translate that
knowledge into how we build places and how
we protect our citizens.”
WAIKATO RESEARCHERS' UNIQUE APPROACH TO FRESH
NEW ZEALAND scientists could
monitor the water quality of the
country’s largest 4,000 lakes if they
made better use of technology and
collaborated with experts from
other disciplines.
Waikato University Professor
David Hamilton, who is the Bay of
Plenty Regional Council Chair in Lake
Restoration and leads theWater Quality
Group for LERNZ (Lake Ecosystem
Restoration New Zealand), says the
information potentially available by
such a move “is quite remarkable”.
Remote sensing technology has
been around for more than 20 years
and has been used by LERNZ for several
projects, including monitoring of a
diversion wall in Lake Rotoiti. The wall
diverts water from the Ohau Channel
– which links Rotoiti to Lake Rotorua
– into the Kaituna River, rather than
allowing it to flow into Rotoiti.
“We had a major decision-making
process to be able to try to understand
what might occur (when the wall was
built). We had to be fairly confident
that if you built this $10 million wall it
was going to work,” he says.
“We took the information
contained in a remote sensing spectral
image and could see where the water
from Lake Rotorua was going – through
the Ohau Channel and down into the
Kaituna, effectively bypassing Lake
Rotoiti once the wall was installed.”
The application of remote sensing
methods for measuring lake water
quality has been developed through
University of Waikato student Mat
Allan’s recently-completed PhD in the
LERNZ group.
Professor Hamilton says similar
technology could now be combined
with lake monitoring buoys to validate
information from satellites passing
overhead to monitor the 4,000
New Zealand lakes larger than one
hectare. Lake monitoring buoys, which
have been pioneered in New Zealand
by Professor Hamilton’s University
of Waikato colleague Chris McBride,
currently take water quality readings in
12 North Island lakes every 15 minutes.
They could be deployed more widely
around the country to potentially
Leading University of Waikato researchers were in Wellington recently to present
a multidisciplinary overview of freshwater issues to key stakeholders and policy makers.
Collaboration and technology
key to better water data
connect with a satellite every time it
passed overhead, providing valuable
real-time data.
“At the moment we’re monitoring
roughly 100 lakes throughout New
Zealand. So what could be done would
be to suddenly open up an archive from
100 to 4000 lakes by using this type of
technology,” says Professor Hamilton.
He says NASA has recently
released an archive of remote sensing
images collected over the past 30 years
“but at the moment we don’t have the
people or collaborations developed to
be properly utilising this information”.
“We’re able to connect many of
these different types of technologies
but we have disciplinary boundaries.
The real challenge is connecting these
disciplines to optimise the quality of
the information.
“It involves more than just the
people who can take the remote
sensing images. It involves connecting
with the IT people, who can process
the enormous volumes of data, with
people on the ground who are actually
doing the measurements and with
remote sensing technologists.”
Professor Hamilton says many of
New Zealand’s freshwater scientists
recently got together and developed
three major themes – legacies,
resilience and rehabilitation – which
they considered to be “critical” to
the management of fresh water
in New Zealand. They would need
collaboration to address these themes
and improve the status of freshwater in
New Zealand.
LAKEWATCH: About 100 NZ
lakes are remotely monitored.
