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Gren Christie, Foundling Member of Wise Water Use
The HB Regional Council has produced a report on the state of play of the region’s freshwater, the ‘Regional Water Assessment’ report (RWA). While completed late last year, the RWA has yet to be publicly released.
The HB Today newspaper recently reported on some of the RWA's content, predictably motivating a die-hard supporter of the Ruataniwha dam to write a letter to the editor shrieking “just get on and build the dam”.
Wise Water Use’s Gren Christie’s letter in response, published in the Friday 19th May 2023 edition of HB Today, is reproduced below:
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Mention droughts and possible future water shortages and the siren of the Ruataniwha sings again.
There are so many levers that should be pulled before we start doing more damage to our environment.
The first cab off the rank needs to be water allocation reform.
Currently in Hawkes Bay, CHB uses the most water per capita for the lowest return. Most of this water is used for just a handful of intensive dairy farms - a major cause of pollution to our waterways.
The RWSS Hawkes Bay Regional Council 2017 review reported that all monitored sites within the Ruataniwha Plains exceeded Board of Enquiry nitrogen limits by between 130% and 420%.
This is not helping us build a resilient thriving economy and community now or in the future.
The damming of rivers is the very last thing we should be thinking of, particularly when the Water Report everyone is talking about states amongst other things that if we make the right changes there could be a water surplus in the future.
This information is not on the HBRC webpage where only some parts of the Report are public but not the full Report.
This is very poor practice. It opens up accusations that the HB Regional Council are cherry picking what information they want the public to know.
In the interests of informed public debate, this whole Report should be made public ASAP.
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