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Proposed National Environmental Standard on Ecological Flows and Water Levels: Discussion Document

• Acknowledgements
• Executive Summary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ecological Flows and Water Levels in the Context of Environmental Flows and the Resource Management Act
• 3 How Could National Direction Address Issues with Ecological Flows and Water Levels?
• 4 The Options
• 5 Proposal for an NES on Ecological Flows and Water Levels
• 6 Preliminary Evaluation of Costs and Benefits of Preferred Option
• 7 Future Actions to Complement the NES
• 8 What Next?
• 9 References
• Appendix 1: Definitions
• Appendix 2: Existing Approaches to Ecological Flows
• Appendix 3: Environmental Flows and Water Levels
• Appendix 4: Executive Summary and Recommendations from: Draft Guidelines for the Selection of Methods to Determine Ecological Flows and Water Levels (Beca 2008)

7 Future Actions to Complement the NES

The proposed national environmental standard addresses the ecological component of environmental flows and water levels. The working group stressed the need for other work on the complementary parts of decisions about environmental flows and water levels.

Work that would assist the overall implementation of this standard includes:

• carrying out applied science on interim limits to alterations of water levels for lakes and wetlands. This work would assist in describing the degree of hydrological alteration used in the technical document

• developing / providing monitoring guidance on the requirements for evaluating whether, once ecological flows and water levels are in place, the ecological values are being protected to the level predicted, and providing a feedback mechanism for reviewing and varying regional plan provisions. Guidance could apply to monitoring adherence to resource consent conditions, plan effectiveness and state of the environment monitoring

• implementing science programmes to evaluate the appropriateness of ecological flows and water levels at achieving the stated outcomes and levels of protection, preferably using a classification system to increase the applicability of results across all water bodies

• developing methods to reflect uncertainty in the information given to decision-makers around ecological flows

• developing standardised methods for estimating average annual recharge of groundwater.

Work to address the technical tools used to assess the other components of environmental flows and water levels includes:

• developing an equivalent technical document on recreational methods

• developing and testing methods for determining the other components of environmental flows (eg, landscape, tangata whenua, cultural and amenity values), and ultimately the technical documents on these components.

Work to address other issues around decisions about environmental flow and water level includes:

• developing methods for responding to uncertainty within decision-making frameworks

• providing guidance on how to structure environmental flow and water level decisions that are clear about the values provided for and the process used to address ecological, economic, social and cultural benefits and costs

• developing consistent approaches to responding to the potential impacts of future climate variability or climate change on the availability of water resources.

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