Ranking New Zealand river values – a novel approach to managing the ‘chalk and cheese’ problem
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In New Zealand, regional councils have the task of sustainably managing rivers and
their flows. In trying to achieve this task they face enormous challenges including the
need to allocate flows amongst often highly disparate in- (e.g., angling, kayaking,
native fish and birds) and out-of-river (e.g., irrigation and hydro energy) values/needs.
To aid in this task these councils need to know which rivers or parts of rivers are
relatively more or less important on national, regional and local bases, for particular
values. This task becomes even more challenging given limited information
availability for many values, and no overarching policy or decision framework. In this
paper I report on a FRST-funded (and less than 1-year long) project which has
addressed these challenges. A multi-criteria and expert panel based methodology has
been developed and applied to a wide range of values to produce lists of rivers by
value, ranked according to their national, regional and local importance. The
methodology is described and example applications given. The need to ‘buy-in’ multi-and,
ultimately, interdisciplinary participation is emphasized as well as a range of
ongoing implementation challenges and further needs.