Catchment Catch-up Workshop
19 September 2006
Summary Report
The aims of the Sustainable Farming Fund (SFF) Catchment Catch-Up workshop on investment in catchment management and extension were to:
- enable teams working in catchment management, together with SFF staff & other funders, to gain a better understanding of the critical success factors underpinning successful catchment management projects;
- identify gaps / priorities for future research and extension;
- improve linkages and clarify boundaries among different funders
- provide the opportunity for project teams to network and share experiences with other catchment specialists.
The net outcome from the workshop was to help both develop higher quality SFF applications for catchment management projects, and to improve the SFF’s ability to assess these.
Workshop Outcomes
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Critical Success Factors
The workshop identified common success factors that appear to have contributed to effective catchment projects in the past. These success factors are:
- A clear, shared and realistic community vision — with visible and measurable outcomes.
- Commitment of the key community decision-makers.
- Engagement of a wide set of stakeholders in the project planning and preparation phases, and preparedness of these stakeholders to stick with the project.
- Clear leadership, on a sustainable basis, with clearly defined roles within the project.
- Achieving outcomes that are doable, practical and applicable to land users within the term of the project.
- A team capable of delivering both the community engagement and technical skills.
- Realistic budgets for research and/or extension.
Action/Response:
Future applications to the SFF for catchment-related projects funding should demonstrate these factors in their applications.
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Gaps & Priorities
The workshop identified some areas that were considered to be important gaps in knowledge and/or practice for catchment management. These are:
- Identifying community needs.
- The development of economic frameworks for framing and developing solutions.
- Finding solutions that support behavioural change.
- Resourcing and building capability.
Action/Response:
SFF is a contestable fund, so catchment projects are ranked against both each other, and against all other types of projects. In a similar manner to the success factors noted above, these priority areas provide a further means of assisting in ranking catchment projects relative to one another.
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Clarify boundaries among funders
The workshop sought greater clarity about what the SFF does/does not fund. SFF can fund:
- Local and national scale projects
- Extension and information transfer
- Development of tools and resources
- Applied research (i.e., research that takes place in the field and has a direct end use)
- Development of models into user friendly tools for farmers
- Co funded projects.
Note: SFF applications with strong co-funding rank higher than those with less. Strong financial and in-kind support is a good demonstration of the commitment of the Community of Interest to the project — both in terms of participating in the work and adopting/applying any outcomes on a sustainable/on-going basis. Co funding also provides the critical mass to make meaningful progress in meaningful timeframes.
SFF does not fund (likely funding source is in brackets):
- Capital expenditure — e.g., implementing large scale riparian plantings, fencing and effluent systems (the Community of Interest directly)
- Long term fundamental research (FRST’s PGS&T)
- On-going operational costs (the Community of Interest directly)
- Commercial development of a product (NZTE)
- Projects that benefit individual farmers or single businesses (FRST’s TechNZ).
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Networking and experiences sharing
Given the wide range of groups and funders involved in catchment work, the workshop noted that it would be beneficial to have easy access to information on integrated catchment management activities being carried out throughout the country.
Action/Response:
SFF to coordinate with FRST and others to compile such a database (timeframe t.b.c. — e.g., to capture Water Programme of Action and Dairy Environment Strategy activities).
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Other Outcomes
The workshop also provided ideas on how SFF could contribute to future catchment work. This feed back has been grouped as follows:
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Action/Response |
Project Criteria |
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Communication with Project Team |
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Communication with Other Funders |
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Leadership |
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Appendices
Collected notes from the Morning Session:
Successes
Rerewhakaaitu - Rotorua
How did we know it was successful?
- All farmers have adopted Best Management Practices and nutrient budgets
- Questioning and requirements for more information
- Clear evidence of behaviour change
- People from other catchments have come to view the project
- Groups, agencies and research organisations want to become involved
- Regional Council have become involved and are using this to inform other initiatives.
What made it successful?
- Level of enthusiasm created
- Personality of science personnel involved
- Committed project manager who ensured farmers buy in
- Benefits identified to farming community
- Enthusiastic and committed farming community
- Practices informed by science in context of farm system
- Good project management.
Waikakahi
How did we know it was successful?
- Stream fences
- Water quality improving (on going N research)
- Overall habitat improving
- Community is still interested and engaged after 6-7 yrs
- Beginning to change practices around border dyke irrigation
- Research around trout spawning
- Ongoing funding (ECan) and work.
What made it successful?
- Part of a larger project (5 catchments), therefore learning is shared wider over regions/sector
- Scale: manageable discrete boundaries, i.e. most people are able to attend meetings
- Community ownership
- Multi agency approach – taps into research funding
- Communications.
Orari Catchment
How did we know it was successful?
- Range of stakeholders
- Ongoing good attendance
- Expectations were met.
What made it successful?
- Developing strategy (which is community based)
- Having a variety of information from different sources and experts and interest groups
- Good administration – records kept and distributed
- Community driven
- Landcare Trust and ECan came on board
- Presentations from different interest groups and issues
- Regular meetings to workshop issues followed by additions to draft strategy.
Taieri Catchment
How was it successful?
- 5 years
- Communication between interested groups bringing together of complex interests
- Shared visions
- Notable breakthroughs with groups working together
- Access for the whole community to have input
- Set up communication systems for information exchange/diverse modes of delivery.
What made it successful?
- Coordinator independent of all stakeholders to drive it along
- Open door policy
- Two way relationships between researchers and community
- Formed relationships with different agencies.
Canterbury Strategic Water Study
How did we know it was/is successful?
- Completed stages widely cited
- Remained within budget
- Deliberate focus on engagement
- Demand for Stage 3 results to feed into decision making.
What made it successful?
- Political support
- Effort to secure co-funding
- Foresight to see future need
- Peer review (gives confidence)
- Scientific understanding before engagement.
- Project management and engagement.
Goldburn/Broken (Australia)
How did we know it was successful?
- Ongoing funding support (over 15 yrs)
- Change in practice have occurred (still farming)
- Ongoing good relationships between farmers, agencies and the community.
What made it successful?
- Evolved from single issue to multi issue focus (over 15 yrs)
- Adoptive management
- Good social research component (not just with farmers but with other agencies involved)
- Identify infrastructural issues
- Farmer representation at all levels.
Other Successes and why they were successful
- Hart’s Creek Ellesmere catchment riparian planting
- Prioritise and identify the issues
- Rabbit and Land Management Programme (1990-99)
- Changed behaviour and land use - monitoring
- Resource Care Section (ECan) living streams programme
- Effective community involvement
- Whatawhata Catchment project
- Multiple goals from catchment – monitoring/development of indicators/multi stakeholders
- Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust
- Feasible plan of action/funding support/partnership with agencies
- Manapouri Scheme
- Effective dialogue
- Scarborough Flax Bourne
- Brought together range of skills to work with farming groups
- Kaipoi Lakes – Northland
- Motueka
- Lower Waitaki
- Upper Waipa – Avon/Heathcote estuary/Orari
- Taupo/Rotorua
- Raglan (Harbour)
- Lots of action/knowing the issue
- Ellesmere – prioritise and ID issues
- Mackenzie Basin – stakeholder coordination and commitment
- Tasman
- Science knowledge of water available
- Community involvement in decision on allocation
- Lake Taupo
- Community ownership of lakes in response to threats of pollution
- Including land users
- Everyone has a part to play and not a blame game
- Community bodies have engagement of memberships
- Waikakahi (Glenavy)
- From the mid 1990s to now, sediment was reduced from 600 to 200 tonnes
- Planting of native plants by schoolchildren
- Teonepi (Piako river system)
- 10 yrs of research
- Farm Plans – guidelines/upstream catchments/Piako River Recreation
- Scientists developing a simple message for farmers
- Pahau
- Engagement of community
- Involvement of ECan
- Waimea
- Successful engagement process.
Gaps
How Community engagement is being done
What makes this a significant gap?
- Sets the tenor for whole focus of work (without enthusiastic community it won’t go anywhere)
- Who needs to be engaged/for what purpose?
- Identification of communities of interest/community of place
- We need more models to add to the toolbox for engagement
- Challenges are greater for communication than they were in the production extension era.
What would be the impact if this gap was filled?
- Enables community to be informed by a range of data/science and researchers to access community information
- Staging of funding to enable community engagement?
- Community might hold info that strict data sets don’t have
- Communication methods to extend information will change (move from extension models to personal development)
- Builds commitment to initiatives and processes
- Going through this type of model can avoid environment court appearances.
Lack of capability e.g., environmental management, project management.
What makes this a significant gap?
- Lack of ongoing funding
- Lack of political will (e.g. focus on regulation vs extension)
- Trends change continually e.g. N – soils – water management
- Few people have well rounded skills (e.g. environment vs production)
What would be the impact if this gap was filled?
- Good people can focus on doing and less time chasing funding (although a balance is needed)
- Increase change on farm (e.g. nutrient budgeting)
- May be less following trends just to get funding.
Understanding, promoting and evaluating behaviour change (social science).
What makes this a significant gap?
- People at heart of problem and solution
- Environment alone is not enough motivation for change (but change is needed)
What would be the impact if this gap was filled?
- Help identify best mix of regulation/extension (for different/regions and situations/catchment sector)
- Getting right mix of involvement of stakeholders.
Other Gaps Identified
- What is the real question?
- Need processes to understand
- What data is available is not understood. How that data is shared with
out spins
- Data gaps
- Monitoring long term
Social Science
- Difference in needs and expectations between groups – understanding where gaps come from
- Putting value on anecdotal information, how do we use it
- How do we speed up the process?
- How do you measure behaviour change?
- Understanding adoptability
- Understanding what triggers individuals to change behaviour
- Vis-à-vis “peer pressure”
- Rural/Urban understandings and perceptions.
- Need to have better indicators of behaviour change.
Funding
- Longer Term funding to enable monitoring
- Funding
- Ranking/prioritise with limited resources/funding
- Funding needs of providers.
Leadership
- Lack of national leadership
- Water Programme of Action
- Who is driving NZ Inc
- Coordination between regions
- Political support doesn’t necessarily mean results.
Identifying community needs
- Balance between must haves and nice to haves
- Individual action may or may not aggregate to change because of the
biological effects
- Tools not there to monitor (or limited)
- Putting the whole thing into a systems focus (farm, biological and social)
- Various values of water of which commercial is only one
- Community values – recreational, knowing it’s there
- Lack of multi-stakeholder strategic visioning “We can’t see beyond our next annual plan”
- How do these projects inform decision makers?
Data gaps
- Lack of long term data and funding of it
- Need it for trends
- To measure change
- Catalyst for action
- Not having all the information on water resources/groundwater/surface
water
- Size of resource
- Downstream water quality issues
- Accessing existing resource information
- Lack of resources – money
- For some catchments there’s complete lack of knowledge – how can we manage a catchment if we know nothing about it?
Science
- Common set of environmental indicators
- Need details, models
- Science gaps – in specific areas and specific catchments
- We don’t have the tools to have informed discussions about land and water values
- Environmental flows – flow range for different outcomes
- Effects of extraction – users/coast
- Do we even know our real baseline targets?
- Meaningful outcome indicators – how do we know that we are making change?
- Getting to the hard stuff
Information
- Getting information to stakeholders
- Information/knowledge management portal – National gateway
- Lack of good case studies that are transferable to other areas
- Can the process be facilitated to transfer knowledge between catchments/regions
- Knowledge exchange and access to work already done
- Gap in implementation of the knowledge
- Lack of understanding between surface and groundwater relationships
- How do we value a catchment? What do we protect? Who makes these decisions?
- Best mix of regulation/extension (for different/regions and situations catchment/sector)
- Getting right mix of involvement of stakeholders (who/when...?)
- Lack of capability e.g. environmental management, project management
- On-going support (funding)
- Social costs of diffuse discharge e.g., sedimentation
- Tools for identifying and sharing values
- Rational basis for determining water allocation
Economic
- Links between environment, productivity and economics
- Lack environmental economists and “trade-offs”
- Benefits/costs of Best Management Practices (all parties)
Project Management
- Life time delivery of projects
- Coping with:
- Long time frames – political/personnel
- Multiple stakeholders – commitment/intensive and coordination/communication
- Integration and synthesis of knowledge and its extension
- Ensuring the components understand and add-up to the big picture
Challenges
Project Design
- Finding a balance between action and understanding the issues
- Making sure projects are balanced so that researchers can provide some of the understanding required within budget
- The challenge of getting the right mix of approaches e.g. regulatory, voluntary and incentive
- Trade off between consulting everyone and getting the community fully engaged and time and money
- Integration of environmental issues into overall decision making.
People
- Limited capability in NZ
- Science = catchment and water
- System thinkers
- Meeting expectations is a challenge stakeholders expect quick delivery of catchment data and outcomes
- Too much finger pointing – not enough walking in each others shoes
- People with fixed positions without the facts
- The challenge of keeping land users and the rest of the community engaged in the process.
Science
- Toolbox relatively empty and goal posts will shift so how do we get higher flying fruit.
- Getting robust data and developing both new and existing data sets.
- IP claims by researchers. It is expensive to sort it out.
- Misalignment of policy and research timelines
- Compiling, existing understanding and making it easily accessible
- Translation of science into a farm system context
- Chang varies, it can be slow in some regions/catchments.
Political
- Lack of leadership by Central Government and Water Programme of Action
- Diversity of approaches by Regional Councils
- Diversity of approaches within Regional Councils e.g. regulation vs education.
Funding
- Short term funding for long term projects
- Lack of funding and resource certainty
- Funding mechanisms focus on tool development
- Need funding commitments at all levels, National, Regional Council and annual planning
- Science in projects placed to gain funding but not resourced to give relevant robust solutions
- Fight to keep budget for the future when sector/industry wants today’s issues solved
- Funding drivers are at a national level but actions require local science that can’t always be replicated.
Collected notes from the afternoon session
What should SFF look for in a successful project?
Projects that have:
Clear, shared, realistic community vision - with measurable outcomes
- Agreed vision focus for catchment (community / farmers)
- Goals
- Clear
- Agreed by community
- Long term economic and environmental benefit
- Clear vision for the future of the catchment
- Know where you are going (vision)
- Clear, agreed outcomes with a process to achieve the outcomes
- Clear realistic vision and action plan
- Measurable outcomes.
Engagement and commitment of stakeholders incl. Community decision makers in preparation of project proposal and ongoing or, a process that will deliver engagement
- Community and external stakeholder commitment
- Community support from the bottom up, with a champion to make it happen
- Engagement processes leading to outcomes inc. BEH change system perspective
- Authentic community engagement and participation
- Real community engagement from all stakeholders
- Engagement of all stockholders
- Successful, ongoing community engagement
- A willing and engaged community
- Genuine engagement - broad range, working towards agreed vision
- Continuing interest and engagement of community over the lengths of time required to get positive trends
- Community/participant buy in
- Engagement of stakeholders
- All stakeholders participating.
Sustainable clear leadership, clearly defined roles
- Strategic leadership and management
- An adaptive management team/approach
- Leadership, including sustainable leadership (burn out)
- Project co-coordinator that has enough time and support to work with the community in the catchment
- Strong and fresh leadership of the project
- Champion to connect all the right people and capability
- Leadership
Outcomes that are doable, practical, applicable to land users and achievable within the term of the project
- Progress and positive change occurring (i.e. meeting objectives of study)
- Focus associated excellent project management
- Focus
- Resource
- Deliver
- Meet outcomes
- Farmer adoptability especially be economically viable for the farmer by products; Environmental and social benefits
- Practical solution, “doable” and effective
A team capable to deliver
- Credible technical/science support people
Gaps that could be addressed by SFF projects
Economic framework for solutions
- Prioritisation of projects that link between environment, productivity and economics
- Cost /benefit analysis of Best Management Practice
- Costs/benefits of action/in action
- Link economics/productivity/environment
- A review of the social, economic and environmental benefits from previously conducted ICM projects
Finding solutions to support behavioural change
- Tools to assess effect of local change at catchment scale
- What will trigger behaviour change in land users toward more sustainable land-use practices
Identify Community needs
- Community led projects that improve land management practices with catchment benefits
- Addressing real needs for farmers and rest of community
- Defining the catchment resource we are dealing with
Resourcing and building capability
- Extension
- Capability
- Social marketing
- Practical, useable outcome
- Demonstrated connection to industry/policy strategies with application of research from FRST funded projects
- Alignment with bigger picture
- Confidence and ability to deliver
Fill Data gaps
- Community defining its values and research to quantify them
- Resource allocation data
- Applied science – More hydro data
ICM Information management
- Information linkages and sharing “catchment portal”
- Portal of ICM projects and learning.
Other
- Low-cost measures farmers can take to minimise nutrient losses to water
- Provide links to others, or information
- BMPS Research
- Researchers
- End users
- Regional councils
- Amateurs
- Fits within proposed time frames.
What can SFF do to facilitate things going forward?
Note – these were comments collected in the wrap up of the day, comment on these has been provided in the summary to the workshop.
- Be available for project teams to discuss – can we be more strategic in the way we use money?
- Be clear in the context for apps. (what is SFF about?)
- Communicate a bit more what Phase II panel look for – Visit/assessment to key stakeholders
- Clarify intension/purpose of SFF of other funders – ideas from the morning captured and sent round
- Offer feedback to unsuccessful applications on what was good/bad (phase I and II)
- SFF/MFE/FRST discuss capturing catchment management research
- What is required of projects to be clear as possible/support from SFF
for applicants; two categories:
- national priorities
- local priorities
- SFF has the opportunity to push the boundaries (not more of the same in other place)
- Should local catchment projects be assessed and guided by local councils/national bodies assess national projects
- SFF and council understanding of what we will find/want find
- Don’t try to get prescriptive – remain enabling/available for innovation
- Concern in relationship with Regional Council being required
- Discussions with SFF and ECan the complexity of financial arrangements
- Purpose of SFF Co-Funding in catchment work – especially for where science fits in the process
- SFF use capacity building as a criteria for projects
- Clarity on how to identify opportunities that add value to outcomes
- Do more events like this for networking
- Show leadership communicate purpose
Contact for Enquiries
Fund Administrator
Sustainable Farming Fund
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
PO Box 2526
Wellington
Tel: 0800 100 087
Fax: 04 894 0741
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