7 Reporting
As discussed earlier, it will be possible to compile a national overview of the environmental effects of the Accord by collating the data available from the four best practice dairy catchments and the additional recommended eight or so regional catchments. This will be carried out by MfE on a five-yearly basis.
A reporting format needs to include the following matters:
7.1 Reporting progress towards Accord targets
It will be necessary to continue and enhance regular reporting of progress towards Accord targets, and to report the environmental outcomes of implementing the Accord. It is suggested this be as follows:
- Fonterra report annually on farmer surveys and any independent auditing showing progress towards meeting Accord targets.
- MfE collate data annually from regional authorities on compliance with resource consents by Fonterra suppliers. This should be published at the same time as the Fonterra report, which will be in October or November each year.
- Regional authorities summarise information from the Tier 2 catchments, and Fonterra summarise work in the four best practice dairy catchments, once every five years starting early 2012. These reports will focus on the environmental outcomes of implementing the Accord.
- MfE compile a national overview of progress towards Accord targets annually starting June 2007. Every five years this report will be much expanded as it will also report on progress towards environmental outcomes.
7.2 Regional progress towards environmental outcomes
Regional reports on progress towards meeting environmental outcomes should follow a consistent format to allow ready compilation of information. This should include:
- a description of the catchment being monitored
- land use in the catchment, and any changes in land use in previous years
- summary of progress towards Accord targets
- flow records (if available)
- summary of water quality sampling results
- summary of biological monitoring results
- trend analysis (if appropriate)
- discussion - emphasising any links between implementation of the Accord and environmental outcomes.
Such a report should be prepared for each of the Tier 2 catchments every five years starting early 2012.
7.3 National progress towards environmental outcomes
The information collected by Fonterra and the regional authorities on environmental outcomes could be collated in a number of ways. It is beyond the scope of this report to do this, but there are two matters to which careful attention will need to be paid:
- given that the dataset is relatively small with diverse catchments of different sizes and characteristics, much caution is needed if using aggregated information to show any nationwide trends
- it is doubtful it will be possible to show any statistically significant changes from the Tier 2 catchments. If statistical validity is desired, then studies should be designed to show the benefits of, say, excluding stock or bridging a heavily used crossing.
Some overview could, however, be provided in several ways, such as presenting aggregated information on the water quality upstream and downstream of the dairy farms together with any changes in that water quality over time, as Accord actions are implemented. It may be possible to isolate specific actions (such as fencing or culverting) in the time series of data and attribute water quality improvements to those practices.
It may then be possible to undertake very broad-scale 'predictions' of national benefits. If, for example, the study catchments showed that fencing of all Accord streams on dairy farms resulted in (say) a 20 percent reduction in annual nutrient mass loads to the monitored streams then predictions could be made of the national level benefits that might result if all dairy farms undertook similar actions. This could be done by calculating average nutrient outputs per hectare [This information is available from literature and New Zealand catchment studies including those referred to in this report.] for farms without streamside fencing and multiplying that value by the area of dairy farms nationally, and comparing that to the value assuming all farms implemented stream-side fencing.
Such predictions should be limited to a few key parameters such as nitrate nitrogen, total phosphorous and total suspended sediments. It would be meaningless to predict mass loads for faecal bacteria, but it may be possible to use alternative indicators such the number of occasions per annum that contact recreation standards were breached up stream and downstream of the monitored farms based on monthly sampling frequencies.
Similar 'predictions' of the rough order scale of national environmental benefits could then be made for each of the Accord actions. These 'predictions' could be updated overtime as additional information was gathered by the regional catchment studies and also as the area of land under dairying changed each year.
It may prove difficult to separate out the impacts of individual Accord actions (e.g. stock exclusion as opposed to culverting or nutrient budgeting). In that case it would still be useful to report on the predicted cumulative benefits of the Accord actions taken as whole.
Although there are strong limitations to such an aggregating and predictive approach, some form of national collation or overview is necessary if this strategy is to have any real value. Otherwise MfE will be left with a series of discrete monitoring results from eight or so catchments with no view on the collective environmental benefit of the Accord nationally.
