Our environment suffers – and here's why.
We might well have the solutions but can't plot a path to implementing them.
What do New Zealand’s environmental problems have in common with the recent debacles with our Interislander Ferries losing power or steering, power pylons losing their bolts, and the Air Force 757 failing every delegation the Prime Minister leads?
The answer is that New Zealand always seems to be game for sharp policy debate, but rarely succeeds at complex implementation.
To me, these words offered by Simon Upton, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE), in a preview of his office’s latest report served as the perfect summary of the situation that sum our struggles.
PCE Report (link)
A review of freshwater models used to support the regulation and management of water in New Zealand
For much of my first 10 years in New Zealand, my job title involved being modeller in environmental science, in the same domain on which the PCE reports. After that, I tended to fund and supervise modellers. I’ve know the pain described in the report, and have watched that pain grow worse because of the unique way our nation structures our institutions and the flows of funding – or lack thereof.
Let’s first ponder, why do we need models? How do they help?
Models must be complex to support both regulatory policy and sensible management of activities like farming. A well-known truism states:
all models are wrong; some are useful.
Excellent examples of models doing their job are greenhouse gas emissions inventories, which work well at global and national scales. These models are a series of calculations which allow us to have a plan to address climate change through the Paris Agreement, and to evaluate our progress along the way. They work not because they’re perfect. They work because there’s robust process that builds trust and transparency to weed out errors and keep improving year after year.
We’re having no such luck with water quality and quantity models, which follow norms set within our country rather than by a global community shepherded by IPCC processes.
Upon returning to New Zealand as PCE, Upton’s first report in 2018 addressed the growing controversy that was calling the Overseer Model into question. This model was fast becoming being the main tool used to estimate losses of nutrients from agriculture to waterways. The PCE’s concerns were born out by a further review by MPI, finding the model was not fit for purpose in every chapter commissioned by their terms of reference. Some improvements were made. Guidance on where/how to use it has emerged from the Ministry for the Environment, largely saying to avoid depending solely on this model.
Most importantly, after six years, Overseer is still firmly tagged with a red indicator for transparency. It is not a model we can see through to trust, and has stalled on its path to becoming trustworthy.
Stepping back, I think this is a national affliction caused by the failure to monitor, evaluate and assess. For simplicity, let’s lump these things we don’t do together and call them evaluation.
We don’t evaluate well, but we should.
We’ve tended to be unable to evaluate where the money spent on environmental research goes and what it achieves.
We didn’t evaluate whether international principles of drinking water protection were being implemented and ended up with the Havelock North Campylobacter incident – among the world’s largest in a developed nation.
We don’t even seem to have the ability to evaluate whether it is a bad idea to remove far too many of the bolts attaching a major power pylon to the ground.
The report should galvanise our attention, but we need to see the big picture that drives our national culture of failed implementation – and the associated blame seeking and shedding. Monitor, evaluate and assess.
But where and how do we fix it?
I’ll offer one thought that differs from what I see in my first look at the report and from the briefing. In my view, we shouldn’t focus on embedding support for better freshwater modelling capability primarily in a regulatory agency. That does have some merits, because regulatory agencies are close to implementation. But that can also make them close to the processes of blame seeking and shedding.
Good models and the good data they deserve requires the trust and transparency that comes from a community of practice. It also turns out that models and data can and should be considered common pool resources, and are therefore amenable to Ostrom’s rules for governing common pool resources that earned a Nobel Prize (see p. 63 in pdf).
Resourcing and enabling processes to allow for good, community based governance would help address our reliable habit of falling short of implementation. It would also help achieve another recommendation in this report – including Māori and their worldview properly in freshwater management.
The first rule of trust and transparency
Shining the light into the potentially murky models used to manage freshwater can go a very long way, so please read the report and check out related content. Ask how we can make freshwater modelling and our wider problems with implementing complex solutions.
It is frustrating that we have to, but we must. Even the best scientists can’t build better models (for use) without the right support.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.
-The Lorax
Footnotes: In addition to the report and summary, there’s a StoryMap, and you can find out about the technical, officials and iwi/Māori webinars if appropriate. Here’s a link to the US NSF-funded community of practice for water research and modelling.
Thanks for your thoughts Troy. I'm down with covid so haven't been able to digest properly enough to give my thoughts.