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Water resources, NZ2100 and KiwiGrow - an overview
The problem of sustainable management of water resources can be viewed in term of the sustainable development of catchments, regions, and landscapes. Water problems are intrinsically problems of networks, and often we try to deal with problems at the base of a catchment, rather than within the catchment, where the problems often have their origins in land use changes, inappropriate land management practices, and land degradation - or, more fundamentally, in poverty, lack of access to education, disease, and so on.
So the solution to water resource problems, whether water quality, aquatic ecosystem decline, groundwater or surface water supplies - and their infrastructure equivalents - will often come down to establishing NZ2100-driven sustainable development throughout the catchment.
Integrated catchment management is an idea that has been around for years, but has been difficult to achieve. It has been difficult to establish catchment- or region-wide forms of organisation that have a strong enough ecological - and ecosystem - focus. Any form of political organisation set up for a large catchment or region inevitably becomes a platform for traditional political aims and activities, and the ecological or resource focus is either lost or becomes seriously weakened. 
NZ2100, and KiwiGrow, in providing a basis for collaborative action of groups committed to sustainable development, provides a means to achieve sustainable, integrated catchment management, and sustainable use and management of water resources.
Furthermore, water-based infrastructure systems (including the associated agencies and their employees, as well as users within the community) can themselves be regarded as NZ2100 or KiwiGrow entities. They themselves are complex, adaptive, evolving, living systems that need to develop in a sustainable way. Water infrastructure companies and organisations can accelerate adoption of an NZ2100 / KiwiGrow approach by becoming certified themselves - and perhaps also becoming accreditation authorities as well.
NZ2100 and KiwiGrow provide the basis for addressing water issues in both urban and rural areas.
Please read our downloadable papers:
- Towards sustainable cities - citywide communication for the Assessment of Water Services (2005)
- Supporting integrated catchment management through CD information systems - Waitakere City's Project Twin Streams.
Solving problems at their source
Integrated catchment management, or integrated watershed management as it is known in North America, is the use of coordinated actions throughout a water catchment to achieve goals related to water quality, water flows and resource availability, or the ecology of associated terrestrial, estuarine or marine ecosystems. In natural catchments, water by its very nature, flows down under gravity through the catchment to the discharge point. In urbanised catchments, the flow of water is often affected by imports of water from outside the catchment area, and discharge of wastewater to treatment plants outside the catchment. However, stormwater networks take the water to the lowest point in the catchment, eventually discharging to a water body of some kind. In both urbanised and relatively natural catchments, water is affected by processes and activities throughout the catchment that have an impact on achievement of management goals. While, for small catchments, a water quality problem, for example, may be addressed by installation of a water quality pond or constructed wetland at the base of the catchment, this is much less practicable for large catchments, where solutions must be spread throughout the catchment, addressing problems at or near their source. Thus, polluting industries are regulated, on-site stormwater management devices are required for new developments, and so on. Sustainable solutions to catchment management problems are therefore distributed solutions that involve addressing problems close to their source.
Role of the community
Only in recent years have the size of water management problems begun to be appreciated - whether they are related to degradation of aquatic ecosystems, limits to the available resource, or contamination of groundwater supplies, to name a few. Before this, human activities expanded over the landscape, intensifying as land use changed from rural to peri-urban to urban residential, to commercial-industrial urban areas and city centres. This expansion occurred with little knowledge or regard for the cumulative effects - effects that were the aggregate result of activities throughout the catchment, or were the long term result of insidious processes such as ongoing supply of contaminated stormwater to aquatic ecosystems. So, we have a situation where communities have grown accustomed to lifestyles and business- and land-use practices that have serious, unsustainable impacts. Integrated catchment management requires problems to be addressed as much as possible at their source, and consequently this requires the community to understand both problems and solutions so that appropriate action can be taken. Sustainable solutions to this problem of educating the community involve local authorities and professionals working with communities to jointly clarify the problems and to identify sustainable solutions, which are often not known in advance - either because of cost, or because there is inadequate knowledge of the problem itself, or because there is uncertainty about which solution or collection of solutions best meets community goals. Thus, there must be a process of collaborative learning to develop solutions and clarify problems over time. This requires leadership within the community, as well as from the various professional and governmental sectors. Fortunately, there are usually considerable benefits to community involvement in this way, such as strengthening social networks, and increasing the community knowledge- and skill-base. Ecosystem approach to integrated catchment management
The UNEP Convention on Biological Diversity places great emphasis on the ecosystem approach as a process for realising the sustainable development vision of Agenda 21. An ecosystem is defined as "a dynamic complex of plant, animal and micro-organism communities and their non-living environment interacting as a functional unit", and the ecosystem approach was presented as a coherent systems framework for considering the interaction of human activities with the environment.
The ecosystem concept can be interpreted literally, or, for pragmatic reasons, metaphorically - especially if we aim to build cities and landscapes whose components function more like natural ecosystems, and in harmony with the wider ecosystem context.
- Nurturing
- Supportive
- Stable
- Contributing
- Responsive
- Directed
- Adaptive
NZ2100 |
Thus, we can envisage the landscape of a large catchment as a mosaic of ecosystems, such as subcatchments, residential areas, business or industrial areas, forested areas, farming areas, or forested stream margins. Areas of ecosystems may overlap: an area may be managed as part of more than one system. Most importantly, the environmental and community health of each of these ecosystems can be considered in terms of the NZ2100 framework for sustainable development. Thus, integrated catchment management can proceed operationally as a large number of concordant KiwiGrow™ processes. Each of the processes is driven by the same values, shares the same Common Sustainability Language, and follows broadly the same approach to identify, implement and monitor improvements to achieve sustainable development. Wider coordination is still required at the level of the large catchment, which has its own, whole of catchment KiwiGrow™ process. This provides the basis for gaining agreement on whole of catchment goals, actions and tradeoffs, and is facilitated by the infrastructure of self-directed but consistent KiwiGrow™ sustainability efforts centred on the component ecosystems.
Coordination, leadership, integration, and accountability
Please read our article: Risk governance and remanent magnetism: Increasing the local "force-field" for sustainable management of water.  Draft of Paper for Water NZ Conf Nov 2011 (1024K)
Coordination, leadership and integration for catchment management is achieved by nurturing development of KiwiGrow™ processes within the community. This requires a pro-active effort to explain, promote, and facilitate implementation of the ecosystem approach using KiwiGrow™. Creative Decisions provides services as well as tools to assist this process, which can result in the community of a large catchment familiar with, embracing, and bound by a Common Sustainability Language, and applying it strategically as well as in everyday living. Thus integrated catchment management, which begins as a concern to solve water-related problems at their source, finds expression in an implementation of the ecosystem approach using the NZ2100 sustainable development framework, and ongoing collaborative learning with extensive use of multimedia for education, sharing knowledge, and support for decision-making processes. The web and CD-based multimedia products become the tangible expression of the integration and coordination that exists within the community.
What makes a case study?
Creative Decisions has a particular vision for integrated catchment management, centred on multiple KiwiGrow™ processes operating within the catchment, as well as an overarching KiwiGrow™ process that provides coordination and leadership at the whole of catchment level. It also involves extensive use of multimedia and Web 2.0 to reflect the activities of individual KiwiGrow™ processes, as well as binding them together within the overall catchment framework. This model has many similarities with models for integrated catchment management that exist, for example those in Australia. However the use of the holistic NZ2100 framework is a major innovation that needs to be demonstrated. Two examples of integrated catchment management are briefly introduced here in order to show how it can potentially provide added value to existing processes.
Project Twin Streams
Project Twin Streams, is an urban-rural integrated catchment management initiative of Waitakere City Council. Auckland, New Zealand. It is a community strengthening initiative with a particular focus on the use of a catchment-wide riparian planting and rehabilitation programme to provide a focus and impetus for community involvement. The catchment includes areas within Waitakere City that are undergoing, or expected to undergo, major intensification of urban land use, over the coming decades, as population expands within the Auckland region. At the same time, the streams within the catchment are highly degraded where they pass through established urban areas, and they contribute excessive quantities of stormwater pollutants to sensitive and highly valued estuarine harbour environments. The current growth strategy for the Auckland region involves use of a Metropolitan Urban Limit, so that opportunities for greenfields urban development are limited. Thus, a major challenge for Project Twin Streams is to find innovative ways of creating intensified living and commercial-industrial areas that provide for protection and enhancement of aquatic ecosystems, as well as an array of other outcomes, through a process that energises community involvement in these issues. The opportunity for council-led projects like project Twin Streams, is to promote NZ2100 and KiwiGrow™ values at the whole of catchment level, and encourage small groups within the catchment to adopt KiwiGrow™ as a basis for community strengthening - choosing whichever of the 28 performance areas in the KiwiGrow™ matrix framework is most appropriate for them to focus on, but starting with the proposition that a useful focus could be to focus on "Environmentally nurturing", that is focusing on ecological rehabilitation and regeneration. A CD-based multimedia information system has already been prepared for this catchment.
Whau-Oakley catchment
The Whau-Oakley catchment supports several environmental groups, of which Friends of the Whau is the largest and most established. The catchment straddles the boundary of Waitakere and Auckland Cities, and includes some of the older-settled parts of the Auckland region. It is entirely urbanised, with inadequate stormwater and wastewater infrastructure, resulting in flooding as well as water quality and ecological issues. The Whau River estuary, according to studies by the Auckland Regional Council, is one of the most polluted estuarine environments in the region. Zinc levels in estuarine sediments are increasing rapidly, which seems to be attributable to zinc from poorly maintained or unpainted galvanised iron roofs in both residential and non-residential areas. The catchment is also the focus for major development of the Auckland region motorway network; the preferred route for the final stage passes along the Oakley Creek, and is challenging concerned residents to quantify the benefits of the creek, both presently and under a regime of enhancement and ecological rehabilitation. Friends of Oakley Creek are opposed to the motorway development, but are resolved to extract maximum ecological benefit from resources available as part of any development that occurs.
Both Friends of Oakley Creek, and Friends of the Whau, have chosen to adopt an integrated approach to rehabilitation of the waterways within the catchment. While both groups are currently focused on stream-related ecological rehabilitation efforts, they seek to raise awareness within the wider community, and spawn groups with more local focus. As for the adjacent Twin Streams catchment, there is an opportunity to use the NZ2100 framework as a basis for considering development tradeoffs and synergies, not just in relation to the motorway development, but for other aspects of urban intensification within the catchment. The catchment includes industrial areas that have in the past been identified as significant sources of water pollution, and there is an opportunity to draw these businesses into a KiwiGrow™ catchment network, rather than focus on them as pollution "hot spots" with associated negative connotations, with less regard for the benefits they provide in terms of economic activity and employment. The desire of the community groups to spawn others within their catchment areas would also provide contexts for further testing KiwiGrow™ at this level. A CD-based multimedia information system has already been prepared for this catchment, as for Project Twin Streams. |
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