B+LNZ continues to work across the sector and meet with Ministers and officials on the Resource Management Act replacement legislation. Key concerns include the setting of, and managing to, limits and how biodiversity and stock drinking water will be legislated.
Following our written and oral submissions on the Natural Environment Bill (NEB) and Planning Bill to replace the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA), we’re working closely with other industry groups on common issues. We’re also working on particular issues of concern for sheep and beef farmers.
Limits
A major area of concern across the agriculture and horticulture sectors is the way the legislation is written around environmental limits.
Ministers wanted the new legislation to provide more permissive, flexible rules. Under the draft legislation, however, this flexibility is possible if a catchment is under a limit, but not if a catchment is near to, or over, a limit – in those situations, the draft NEB is significantly more restrictive than the current RMA on getting back to that limit.
Ecosystem health limits for water, land and soil, and indigenous biodiversity will be set by regional councils.
To date, regional councils and communities have wanted to set limits that either maintain or improve on the current state – in many cases regional councils have set highly aspirational limits like getting back to pristine levels.
This means in practice most catchments around the country will be over the limits and subject to a much more highly restrictive framework than under the current RMA and farmers will be worse off.
B+LNZ is seeking changes to the legislation to put some guardrails around how limits are set. In particular, ensuring that regional councils take account of important drivers such as naturally occurring background levels, impacts of more extreme weather events, and existing land use, but that they also undertake detailed economic and social analysis of the impact of any proposed limits and that this information is shared with communities upfront during the consultation process. In recent years this economic analysis has often only come out at the back end of processes, for example during court processes.
We are also advocating for the setting of realistic and practical 10–15 year limits and that long-term objectives should not be expressed as limits but as a vision. This is because to date long term goals have tended to be very aspirational, seeking to get back to pristine levels.
We are also seeking changes to the legislation to ensure that there is some flexibility in terms of meeting the limits to ensure that permitted activities and consents can still occur – if progress is being made towards the limits.
We continue to advocate for the legislation to match the original intent, and are reminding politicians that farmers and growers are committed to making environmental improvements – we just need workable and achievable frameworks.
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is incredibly important to sheep and beef farmers – on average, around 25 percent of New Zealand sheep and beef farms are covered by native vegetation. B+LNZ advocates for farmers to be recognised for and supported in what they do to protect and enhance it, and we have long raised concerns about national policies that can turn biodiversity into a liability.
Under the NEB, limits are required for land and soil, air, freshwater, coastal water and indigenous biodiversity. It currently proposes a high-level goal of no net loss of biodiversity and that regional councils “must” set ecosystem health limits for biodiversity, which would bring biodiversity into the same limit setting framework as water.
We have major concerns about the proposed approach as we have no idea how you can set “ecosystem health limits” for biodiversity and we are concerned about the bureaucracy and litigation that will be created by having a whole new regional planning process for biodiversity that is similar to the water limits framework. We cannot see how limits will be translated to the farm level.
We have similar concerns around land and soil limits.
With the concerns around limits outlined above, we need to get this right.
We have proposed changes to the net loss goal and would like to remove the requirement for regional councils to set biodiversity limits. We think biodiversity should be managed by appropriate national direction, instead of piecemeal across regions. We continue to discuss this with Ministers and officials and will keep farmers updated.
Stock drinking water
As previously outlined in e-diaries, another key priority for the sheep and beef sector is to get changes to the NEB to fix issues that have arisen with respect to access to stock drinking water in overallocated catchments under the RMA.
The RMA section 14(3)(b) specifically authorises the taking of water for stock drinking (no consent is needed), but only if the take or use of water does not (or is not likely to) have an adverse effect on the environment.
As a result of an interpretation of this clause, in the proposed Plan Change 9 for TANK catchments in Hawke’s Bay (which are overallocated for water takes on paper) the plan prohibits new water takes for stock drinking above 20 May 2020 levels – that is, consent cannot be granted for new takes for stock drinking water.
By comparison, there is a consenting pathway in the proposed plan for new water takes for irrigation in the TANK catchment. This makes no sense because in TANK, stock drinking water is estimated to be 0.57 percent of the total water abstracted from the Heretaunga Aquifer, while irrigation takes are estimated to be 57 percent of total takes.
The NEB currently replicates the language in the RMA that has caused problems in the draft TANK plan. Given the greater focus in the proposed NEB on achieving the environmental limits and avoiding breaches, we are concerned that situations like TANK (that is, prohibiting new water takes for stock drinking) will become more common.
Being able to take water for animal drinking is extremely important for farmers. It is an important animal welfare issue – animals suffer and die if they do not have enough drinking water. Farmers need certainty their animals are able to drink as much as they need to sustain themselves.
It is therefore critical that the NEB is revised. We are proposing that stock drinking water is made a permitted activity. We continue to work closely with others to get this issue addressed.